IT Equipment Energy Consumption: The Gap Between Common Idling Assumptions and Real World Conditions

Presenter:  Kenneth G. Brill, Uptime Institute; Andrew Fanara, OSIsoft (formerly US EPA); Ralph Renne, NetApp; John Stanley, The 451 Group

Wednesday, May 19
4:10-4:40 pm, Sutton Complex

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Many in the industry assume that power consumption drops significantly when servers are not processing transactions. SPEC power benchmarking and other data suggest servers should drop 30-70% below maximum power consumption when idle. However, actual UPS load for many data centers drops very little, or not at all, during idle hours. Even if we make the usual assumptions that server "sleep" features have been disabled, this seems counter-intuitive. This presentation and discussion session reports Institute research on actual power consumption swings in a few large scale server installations, examines why the drops aren't close to what's theoretically possible, and explores why some data centers see much bigger drops than others.