Sun’s Latest Server Puts DataCenter Cooling Techniques in the Box

Servers and computers technically aren’t one of largest consumers of electricity in America. In Northern California, datacenters account for only 2.5 percent of the electricity consumed. By contrast, lighting accounts for about 22 percent of the power gobbled up in America.

Electronics and IT, though, represent one of the more promising areas to reduce power consumption. Why? Many datacenters, desktops and components weren’t originally designed for maximum power efficiency. Hence, room to improve exists.

Second, the manufacturers are motivated: Nearly every chip and computer company in the world believes that improved power efficiency will give them a competitive edge. These companies are some of the most obsessive and aggressively competitive outfits on the planet. (Compare how fast GM has moved to improve gas mileage with, say, the pace that Intel has moved to curb power.) Starting in about 2006, power consumption became one of the top concerns for IT managers, which prompted many into action.

The continuing growth of the Internet also means that the power required for computers will invariably rise. Thus, you are going to see a lot of progress in green IT, perhaps at a far quicker rate than in other fields.

Which brings us to the Sparc Enterprise T5440 server from Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu. The server, which was was developed and will be sold by both companies but still more identified with Sun, incorporates a lot of interesting features for cutting power. Sun claims the server consumes 26 percent less power than the IBM Power 560.

For one thing, it has intelligent fan control to better vary the speed of fans. The server is also divided into fan and cooling zones so that the closest fans are utilized to cool the closest components. Variable speed fans are already a favorite in datacenters. Oracle conducted a test earlier this year and found that variable speed fans in a datacenter pay for themselves in around nine months in reduced electricity consumption.

Power distribution is also rerouted digitally, rather than with more traditional analog devices, which increases efficiency.

Another power saving technique: thread parking. The four processors in the server contain eight processing cores each and each core sports eight computing threads. Thus, in a fully-stacked server you can get 256 computing threads. If a thread isn’t active, the server can shut it down to save power. With 256 threads, of course, you can virtualize the bejeezus out of this thing.

It sells for $44,995. That’s a lot more than your typical Intel or AMD server but energy costs are prompting more interesting big, back-end boxes like this.