Design Cycle Catching Up With Green Imperative
A clear trend in the IT industry over the last few years has been an increased focus on so called Green computing, driven not only by the global need to reduce carbon emissions and thereby perhaps reduce the impact of global warming, but also by a more immediate need to reduce the massive amount of power computing equipment draws to meet capacity restrictions and reduce costs. As a consequence, IT vendors have focussed their marketing messages on the green angle, highlighting any product features that can be seen as reducing power consumption or otherwise having a reduced negative impact on the environment. Initially a lot of these claims were more talk than substance, with newer generations of products being labeled ‘green’ because faster processors, multi-core chips, virtualization or some other innovation makes the product more efficient or consolidate ever larger quantities of older products. These innovations are of course simply a consequence of the regular IT design cycle, and would have happened anyway regardless of the relative imminence of the planet’s demise.
However more recently vendors have begun to announce products which have clearly been designed with environmental concerns in mind. Green Computing has now been a priority for long enough for actual green product designs to emerge; the design cycle has begun to catch up with the hype. This was evidenced by Intel’s introduction of the Core Microacrhitecture, which used a power efficient design derived from mobile computing to deliberately create desktop and server processors with low power draw, as well as Sun’s ‘CoolThreads’ UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors which were also specifically designed with reduced power consumption in mind.
A few weeks ago I attended the Fujitsu Siemens Analyst conference in Vienna, Austria. Dr Joseph Reger, the Chief Technology Officer for Fujitsu Siemens, gave a very interesting keynote about Green Computing which showed that, from a European perspective, the IT Industry is as wasteful an energy consumer there as it is anywhere in the world. Amongst the statistics quoted by Dr Reger were the revelation that a single rack at 10–20% utilization consumes as much energy as 12.6 typical German households, and that 40% of all energy in the average German office is wasted by, among other things, devices consuming energy when not in use, such as those in standby mode.
Dr Reger said that Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) is tackling Green Computing in a three phased approach, being production, use and recycling. In the production phase the company is using more environmentally friendly manufacturing techniques and reducing the use of hazardous materials. As for the recycling phase, Dr Reger pointed to a recycling program which commenced at the company’s Paderborn facility in 1988 as a proof point for Fujitsu Siemens' green heritage. The challenge then lies in the second, or usage phase, and this is where it got really interesting as Dr Reger started talking about green product design initiatives.
As it turns out, FSC are in the process of introducing a number of green products across the company’s various product lines. These include a consumer PC made of recyclable materials and plans for a flat panel monitor with a solar powered ‘zero watt’ standby mode. But what interested me the most, as a server analyst, was the PRIMERGY TX120, which is being touted as the world’s most energy efficient server. The TX120 is a single socket tower server, and is at its most efficient when powered by a Celeron processor, so it will not meet any intensive processing needs just yet. FSC claim that it is 40% more power efficient than “other standard tower servers”. There are unfortunately no details on the basis of this 40% claim. Looking at the data that is available, we see that it uses a 250W (nameplate rating) power supply, and Fujitsu claims that the maximum power draw is 163W. On a recent SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark the TX120 drew 109W at 100% utilization. Similar products from other major vendors are yet to be tested on SPECpower, but if we are to look at nameplate data the HP ProLiant ML110 G5 comes in at 365W, The Dell PowerEdge 840 at 420W and the IBM System x3200 is rated at 400W.
Products like the TX120 are but the first emerging examples of an inevitable design trend. While vendors have been talking up their green credentials for a while now, the proof of this rhetoric will lie in the product designs that come out their doors over the next few years. Customers with high power bills and those that are looking to reduce their carbon emissions will be eagerly awaiting the fruits of these labours.
