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Would you buy a car if you had no idea about its MPG rating? Especially with today’s volatile fuel prices, it seems like a crazy idea.
But that’s the situation in data centers today, because there’s no industry-wide standard for how to measure “useful work” in data centers. If we’re really going to get serious about energy use, the number one priority must be defining useful work for servers and, by extension, for data centers.
Call it Server MPG – a measure that helps data center managers make informed decisions as they prioritize their energy efficiency efforts.
Given the urgent discussions on data center energy issues, it seems like an obvious step to take. So when will developing a universally agreed upon Server MPG metric be taken seriously? To get it done, we need a number of groups to get together, including Green Grid, the British Computer Society, the European Union through its Code of Conduct for data centers, Uptime Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the EPA and others.
All these groups need to declare Server MPG the number one priority. The discussion needs to move beyond PUE and other metrics that can actually reward poor energy consumption decisions. We propose a data center efficiency measure based upon a proxy for useful work – CUPS or Compute Units Per Second. Initial discussions with server, storage, and networking OEMs shows a keen interest in this basic concept.
Server MPG doesn’t have to be an “exact” measure. A simple approximation that encourages the proper behavior is all we need. It should be something that can be published right at the IT device level, to help buyers make the right choices. And it should be readily scalable to the data center level.
How much work can this be? In the early 1960s, J. F. Kennedy boldly stated that we would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade – and we did it not once but several times. We even brought them home safely when all hope was lost.
Then why are we not able to get everyone together to agree on Server MPG within a few weeks? Okay, it might take six months of serious dedicated effort since they do not have the benefit of rocket scientists who can work miracles on short notice.
The industry and even the EPA have been quite vocal in lamenting the lack of and need for a definition of useful work in the data center. To paraphrase the classic ‘80s song - We want our Server MPG!
Jack Pouchet is director of energy initiatives for Emerson Network Power.
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Comments
While I’ve been an advocate for this at points in the past, I’ve since come to the conclusion that the analogy is fundamentally flawed. The first issue is that there’s no good corollary to a ‘mile’ for server workloads - HPC, database, web, ERP all have different behaviors, so putting out one number doesn’t help if people can’t connect it to what they really want to do with the server. The bigger problem, though, is that the idea that there’s a ‘car’ is an illusion. The power in servers is used by processors, memory, disks and I/O cards, but your typical 2 or 4 socket server has multiple useful configuration options for each of these, resulting in a combinatorial explosion of possibilities where the lowest power and the highest may be 4x or more apart. Blade servers make this even worse. Finally, this leads to the last flaw, which is to imagine that someone purchasing racks of servers is analogous to someone browsing a car lot. Server purchasers, by definition, need to know what configuration they want and why. Anyone who’s taken that step is well equipped to deal with the real data, which is the impact that each of their configuration decisions has on the result, and to then compare the result to what they’d by from others. This is why most of the big suppliers have gone to detailed power calculators for their servers, so that customers can look at reasonably accurate, expected power for the actual configurations they’re interested in.
David Douglas November 26th, 2008The EPA is already working on this with their ENERGY STAR program. We did a webinar on this topic a few months ago: http://www.42u.com/energy-star-webinar.htm
In summary, the baseline data collection process is under way. Once they have the statistical base of data required they will use that to determine the ENERGY STAR rating, or MPG, for the equipment in the study.
Hang in there Jack, paraphrasing some well worn market speak; it’s coming soon to a data center near you.
Jacque Swartz November 26th, 2008Great article, Jack. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to agree on a single productivity metric for servers, because servers are designed differently to do different things. You and others are driving some terrific work on data center productivity in the Green Grid, but mapping that to individual server figures of merit — whether MIPS or CUPS or FLOPS or SPECxxx or TPCxxx — is difficult. Holding every server to the same productivity standard is like judging every vehicle only by its MPG rating. If we did this to all vehicles, fire trucks and ambulances would be legislated off the streets since they have really bad MPG. A typical data center needs servers of many kinds each designed for a different purpose. Trying to judge them all by a single metric leads to vendors trying to game the system, as the SPECpower initiative has shown.
Oh, and one more thing in response to the comment from 42U: The upcoming Energy Star for servers spec is not an MPG rating. It does not measure how many miles — or useful work — a server delivers per watt of energy. The Tier 1 Energy Star spec specifies power supply efficiencies, reporting requirements and server idle power — it does not specify a standard for work done by the server. Rather than measuring MPG, it specifies how much fuel your car can burn when idling at a red light. Later versions of the Energy Star for Servers spec will likely require some level of work efficiency, but the current version does not. See http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/new_specs/downloads/servers/Draft3_Server_Spec_110408.pdf
Subodh Bapat November 29th, 2008