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Companies like Google are trying to come up with creative ways to use renewable energy, like tidal power, to power energy-sucking data storage centers. But while they're coming up with ways to float their servers in the middle of the ocean, Sun Microsystems has come up with a way to cut how much energy servers use in the first place. The company is launching a new line of data storage products that use far less energy than traditional systems and dramatically cut costs.
According to researchers at Stanford University, between 2000 and 2005 the energy used by data servers doubled to 123 billion kwh, equaling one percent of the world's electricity use. The new systems developed by Sun use open source and solid-state memory drives, which require less power because they don't have moving parts. The systems will use 25 percent of the energy used by current systems.
The even better news is that Sun claims that the reduction in power consumption plus the use of an open source system will cut costs by 75 percent compared to its competitors. Let's hope that will be enough incentive to get companies to use the new products and cut their energy consumption.
via Earth2Tech
Image via Sun Microsystems
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written by David Keech, November 12, 2008
Old x4500: 1800 W
So around 5% difference in power consumption. Whoop dee doo.
Both servers have 48TB capacity. The 7210 also has two optional solid state drives of 18GB each and the CPUs are quad core instead of dual core. I really don't think two extra optional solid state drives are going to make much difference to the power requirements of a server with 48 traditional drives.
You can save a lot more power by consolidating several older servers into one single newer and more powerful server.
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written by Corban, November 12, 2008
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written by Clinch, November 12, 2008
I'm just not sure whether I should be excited by this article, or remain apathetic
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written by CosetTheTable, November 13, 2008
Corban--- when you get into storage with many terabytes, the software is an important component, and it doesn't tend to be a separate purchase. A PC is somewhat independent from its OS, an enterprise storage offering.... not so much.
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It costs a lot more up front, is faster, and uses much less electricity.
The only thing Sun brings to the party that's new is open-source code, but that's not necessarily the right match for the highest end storage.