Loss of Power

Electricity.  It lights our houses, cooks our food and allows us to watch and listen to events that occur half way around the globe.  It powers our watches and allows us to pick up a phone and call someone a thousand miles away.  It powers our lives.

It powers our computers.

The idea was that computers would become smaller, cheaper, more efficient at doing work for us.  Guess what?  In order to do this they consume more power.  The average Dell "high end" server is smaller, faster, more capable of doing fantastic things, but it also consumes about 20% more energy than its predecessor.  Unlike everything else that becomes smaller, faster, better, the power consumption of computers has gone up. People have always expected a higher density for server rooms (more computers in the same space) and server rooms that are constantly growing in size, but for the same number of computers to chew up more power?  In many respects that slipped by peoples radar.

Server rooms have always been built with some excess capacity and ours is no problem.  Indeed, if our server racks were filled to the brim with hardware from three years ago, I think we wouldn't be having this conversation.  But, power requirements for an individual server have gone up and as a result our ability to add more hardware is limited by the capacity of our server room.  We're short on capacity.  Indeed, I don't think we can add all of the new hardware we have without seriously overloading every circuit we have. 

Let's look at some examples and cry:

Example 1:  a Dell 2650 consumes 357 watts while a Dell 2850 consumes 524 watts.  That is almost a 50% increase, even though the amount of space consumed is the same. 

Example 2: a Dell 2950 consumes 307 watts and takes up 2 U of space, approximately 154 watts per U.  A Dell 1850 consumes 444 watts in a single U.  So while we consume half the space we almost triple the power consumption per U.

Newer machines are greener, consuming less power per U of space, but we don't have a lot of the latest generation of machines, those that are efficient with their use of electricity.  In the past we've upgraded machines to give clients the power they need and we've accidentally hampered out ability to expand.  The Dell '8' series (1850/2850) are huge millstones around our neck as we're trying to stay afloat in the electricity ocean.  So what are we doing?  Replacing as many 1850s/2850s as we can.  (See yesterdays note on virtualizing, evergreening and replacing).

So, we don't have a lot of room and the servers that we do have are consuming huge amounts of power.  Can't get any worse, can it?