FOCUS ENERGY
Issue 6, Oct/Nov 2009
WHITE PAPER: ASSESSING TRENDS OVER TIME IN PERFORMANCE, COSTS AND ENERGY USE FOR SERVERS
An extract from a detailed white paper by Jonathan G Koomey, Christian Belady, Michael Patterson, Anthony Santos and Klaus-Dieter Lange examines the energy cost of servers
The authors of the white paper set out to examine the changes to data center costs. “Unfortunately, there has been little systematic, transparent and peer-reviewed work documenting the aggregate trends in IT equipment that are driving changes in total data center costs,” the report states.
To achieve these objectives – or at the very least to start the process towards achieving them – the authors asked the following key questions:
1. What kind of data would be needed to accurately characterise trends in performance per watt, performance per server cost and power use per server cost?
2. Can changes in these parameters be measured in a credible, accurate and representative way using publicly available data?
3. If so, how have these parameters changed over the past 10 years and what can we say about how they are likely to change in the next decade?
“Data centers are at the heart of the global economy. In the mid- 1990s, the cost of these large computing facilities was dominated by the cost of the IT equipment they housed, but no longer. As the electrical power used by IT equipment per dollar of equipment cost has increased, the annual facility costs associated with powering and cooling IT equipment has in some cases grown to equal the annual capital costs of the IT equipment itself.
“The trend towards ever more electricity-intensive IT equipment continues, which means that direct IT equipment acquisition costs will be a less important determinant of the economics of computing services in the future.
“Consider Figure 1, which shows the importance of different data center cost components as a function of power use per thousand dollars of server cost.
“If power per server cost continues to increase, the indirect power- related infrastructure costs will soon exceed the annualised direct cost of purchasing the IT equipment in the data center.
“The 2008/09 server data applies to the servers in Figure 2. Capital and operating cost components have been derived using equations specified in Appendix A of the full document.
“Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute has called these trends ‘the economic breakdown of Moore’s Law’, highlighting the growing importance of power-related indirect costs to the overall economics of IT.
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www.datacenterdynamics.com
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Annual O&M costs
Other infrastructure Annualized power-related infrastructure capital costs
Annual electricity costs
Data center IT from Koomey et al. 2007
Range for 2008-9 servers
20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 IT power (W)/Inflation adjusted IT costs (k 2009 $)
Figure 1: Power-related costs grow as power per server cost grows Annualized IT capital costs
“The industry has, in general, assumed that the cost reductions and growth in computing speed related to Moore’s Law would continue unabated for years to come, and this may be true at the level of individual server systems. Unfortunately, far too little attention has been paid to the true total costs for data center facilities, in which the power-related indirect costs threaten to slow the cost reductions from Moore’s Law.
“These trends have important implications for the design, construction and operation of data centers. The companies delivering cloud computing services have been aware of these economic trends for years, although the sophistication of their responses to them has varied.
“Most other companies that own data centers, for which computing is not their core business, have significantly lagged behind the vertically organised large-scale computing providers in addressing these issues.
“There are technical solutions for improving data center efficiency, but the most important and most neglected solutions relate to institutional changes that can help companies focus on reducing the total costs of computing services. The first steps, of course, are to measure costs in a comprehensive way, eliminate institutional impediments and reward those who successfully reduce these costs. “This article assesses trends in servers to help explain the driving forces affecting data center costs. It develops and documents detailed examples from available data, estimating costs and correcting them for inflation, and explaining the implications of the results.
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