Energy efficiency is also important for reducing the waste in IT from electricity that comes into the data center but doesn’t actually power any computing. Electrical efficiency is measured by a Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) rating. The ideal is to achieve a rating of 1.0, which means each watt of electricity equals 1 watt of computing. The higher the PUE, the less efficient a server, desktop computer or electrical converter is.
Bill Weihl, Google’s energy czar, said at the conference that by improving energy efficiency at five of its data centers, the company reduced its PUE rating to 1.5 from 2.4. Samsung touts the energy-efficiency improvements in its dynamic RAM (DRAM) and solid state disk (SSD) storage products.
An older-model DDR2 memory device consumed 102 watts of power, but a new DDR3 introduced in 2010 consumes only 14 watts, an 86% reduction, says Jim Elliott, VP of marketing at Samsung. Also, Samsung sold its hard disk drive (HDD) business to Seagate Technology earlier this year to focus on SSDs, which, while more expensive than HDDs, are significantly more energy efficient, says Elliott.
SSDs, based on flash memory technology, use 75% fewer watts than an HDD in active mode and 87% fewer watts when the disks are in idle mode. "No moving parts means lower power and heat," he notes.
See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Parallel Memory Optimized (subscription required).
