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Re: Energy consumption vs % utilization?

  • From: Petri Helenius
  • Date: Tue Oct 26 16:22:38 2004 
Alex Rubenstein wrote:




I'm looking for information on energy consumption vs percent
utilization. In other words if your datacenter consumes 720 MWh per
month, yet on average your servers are 98% underutilized, you are
wasting a lot of energy (a hot topic these days). Does anyone here
have any real data on this?





I've never done a study on power used vs. CPU utilization, but my
guess is that the heat generated from a PC remains fairly constant --
in the grand scheme of things -- no matter what your utilization is.



You should be able to pick up simple current / wattage meter from local
hardware store for $20 or so. That will tell you that on a modern
dual-CPU machine the power consumption at idle CPU is about 60% of peak.
The rest is consumed by drives, fans, RAM, etc. As wattage the
difference is 100-120W (50-60W per cpu)



All modern operating systems do moderate job of saving CPU wattage when
they are idle (BSD's, Linux, MACOS X, WinXP, etc.)



Pete