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This article introduces you how to improve the efficiency of the data center server, the content is very detailed, interested friends can refer to, hope to be helpful to you.

Research shows that although the energy consumption cost of the data center is high, the server efficiency is also getting higher and higher.

Each data center has a large number of servers running a variety of workloads. Whether it is an enterprise data center, a managed data center, or a cloud computing data center, it must run around the clock to support those mission-critical applications. Therefore, the primary task of operating a data center is to enhance reliability.

Once the reliability task is completed, its cost and efficiency become the primary problem. Some early-built data centers had overdesigned power and cooling equipment to ensure reliability, but operators soon discovered that more than half of the energy consumption was used to keep IT hardware cooling and cooling, while less than half of the actual energy consumption was used for computing hardware.

Industry manufacturers have been committed to improving the efficiency of the cooling system for many years, making the energy efficiency (PUE) of the new generation of equipment in the data center equal to or less than 1.2, which means that more than 80% of the electricity will be used to run the server.

Server efficiency and energy consumption

Therefore, it is time to study server efficiency and energy consumption in more detail, as this is a major part of data center energy consumption. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, released a survey in February that revealed some interesting statistics.

First, the study confirms an oft-cited rule of thumb that data centers now consume only a fraction of global energy consumption. By 2018, that figure was close to 1%, according to a survey released by the U.S. Department of Energy.

This figure sounds easy to manage, but it masks the fact that data center energy consumption has become a burden. Ireland, for example, is facing a boom in data centre construction, but its grid expansion capacity is limited to meet its electricity needs. According to researchers at the Irish Institute of Engineering, 31% of the electricity in the Irish power grid will be provided to data centres by 2027.

Second, the report shows that the overall figure is not growing as fast as some feared. In 2018, workloads and computing instances in the data center increased more than sixfold compared to 2010, but electricity consumption increased by only 6%.

Improvement in data center performance and cost

"improving data center energy efficiency is not only an environmental strategy, but also a key way to manage operating costs, which makes it a priority area for the industry," said Jim Hearnden, head of power for data centers in EMEA, a Dell technology company. "most IT managers are keen to improve energy efficiency associated with data centers, especially to improve performance and reduce costs."

Clearly, data centers have seen huge efficiency gains-as expected for lower PUE values, with most of the energy consumption coming from data center cooling equipment. From 2010 to 2018, server energy consumption in data centers increased by 25%.

Research shows that this is a substantial increase, although the increase is much smaller than a six-fold increase in workloads, but it also shows that servers are becoming more efficient and able to handle more workloads with less energy consumption.

Much of this is due to more powerful processors. Gordon Moore, former chief executive of Intel, predicts that IT technology is still in the era of Moore's law, with the number of transistors on chips doubling every two years. The more transistors on the chip, the stronger the computing power, because more computing can be done in the chip without having to transfer to neighboring chips.

According to an observation by Intel David House, Moore's Law means that processors should double their computing power every 18 months without increasing energy consumption. Like processors, there is energy consumption that can be eliminated in all the components that make up the data center server.

According to Doug Herz, senior director of technical marketing for motherboard supplier Supermicro, the motherboard produced by the company is used by many large data center builders, and the company has been working to improve the efficiency of servers.

"data center energy consumption growth in the United States has begun to level off," he said. Due to the use of a variety of energy-saving technologies, the growth rate is not so fast. Although the server runs more workloads, it uses less power. We have found that the problem is that data center operators do not focus on idle servers and their costs, and the adoption of new management software can help reduce energy consumption. "

Idle power

Research shows that a server that has been in use for 5 years consumes 175W of energy when it is idle, which is not much less than its full load. More and more servers have been idle in recent years, but Herz estimates that data centers running idle servers may waste 1/3 or even half of their energy consumption.

The management software can balance the workload and allocate tasks reasonably, thus reducing the idle time of the server. "this software is not only used to monitor servers in the data center, but also to balance data center workloads and optimize power supply," said Herz. If you have a large number of workloads, you must distribute them evenly among a specific number of servers, and there may be a more efficient way to achieve this. In addition, servers in the data center need to be consolidated and optimized to run some of them at full capacity. This can achieve economies of scale. "

The energy consumption of the data center can be optimized at a higher level. For example, French provider OVH uses Ultra Micro's motherboard and customizes its servers through specially adjusted racks and water-cooling systems for more efficient cooling.

"it makes good business sense and makes our servers very energy efficient and more cost-effective," said Francois Sterin, chief industrial officer of OVH.

Clearly, energy efficiency is now a top priority at all levels of the data center stack. More efficient server processors are more effectively managed and used more continuously, so they can handle more workloads with less energy consumption.

At the same time, the server uses intelligent cooling technology, while liquid cooling reduces the energy demand for the cooling system, allowing IT hard drives to run at higher temperatures, thus wasting less power.

But Moore's Law will eventually come to an end, and the chip density cannot increase indefinitely, and the same performance improvement cannot be achieved. If the cooling efficiency is improved as much as possible, and the chip efficiency begins to stabilize, how to seek the next efficiency improvement? One possibility is to optimize software programs that run on processors: so how much computing resources are wasted due to code inefficiency?

Another possibility is the transmission of electricity. High-voltage cables that transmit power remotely will result in 8% to 15% power loss. In order to reduce loss, it is best to use localized power supplies, such as the microgrid near the data center.

On how to improve the efficiency of the data center server to share here, I hope that the above content can be of some help to you, can learn more knowledge. If you think the article is good, you can share it for more people to see.

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