Writing for EnterpriseTech, George Leopold notes that data center energy consumption will only continue to increase in the near future – even as regulators attempt to rein in carbon emissions at coal-fired plants tasked with producing much of the electricity used to operate and cool data centers.
To further complicate matters, says Leopold, a recent industry audit determined that investments aimed at improving data center power usage efficiency (PUE) are hitting a wall.
“If business is going well and the information explosion and ‘Internet of Things’ continues, then there will be more data processing tomorrow than there is today,” Bob Landstrom, director of product management for U.K.-based colocation specialist Interxion, told EnterpriseTech.
“Even if every data center in the world is running with a [power usage efficiency] of 1.00, using no energy at all for mechanical cooling, security, or coffee pots – datacenters will demand more energy in the future than is the case today.”
Loren Shalinsky, a Strategic Development Director at Rambus, notes that data centers currently account for 3% of worldwide power consumption, up from an estimated 1.5% just a few years ago. Interestingly enough, memory in data centers, including overhead, accounts for about 20% of total data center power consumption.
“Data centers are becoming more efficient, yet still maintain a PUE of ~1.65. After CPUs, DRAM and HDDs are the next two biggest consumers of the total energy used in datacenter, not including data center overhead such as cooling and AC/DC-DC/DC losses,” he told Rambus Press.
“Industry analysts estimate that cooling and electrical losses in the datacenter represent a 65% overhead. There is additional overhead within the server, and therefore the total DRAM related energy corresponds to about 20% of data center requirements.”
The advent of next-gen memory solutions offers a genuine opportunity to improve overall efficiency. Indeed, the memory industry continues to demand more bandwidth and storage capacity – while simultaneously placing a strong focus on reducing power consumption.
“Recently introduced DDR4 memory will soon supplant the DDR3 memory currently in vogue in the data center. This should lower DRAM power consumption by more than 35%, leading to an overall data center power reduction of almost 8%,” Shalinsky added.
“Meanwhile, the use of a new signaling technology, as implemented in a Beyond DDR4 paradigm, could potentially reduce DRAM power consumption by another 30%. This means overall datacenter energy use – including overhead – would drop an additional 5%.”
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