[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[ChrisQ]

On 10/01/12 08:31, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 12-10-01 03:19, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
>
>> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/10/27/facebook-goes-global-with-data-center-in-sweden/
>
>
> Yep:
> ##
> Facebook to use outside air to cool the tens of thousands of servers
> that will occupy the new campus
> ##
>
>
> Woopty doo, so their cooling costs will be lower. But they still have
> tens of thousands of servers, a number large enough they still need to
> locate near a very large power generation facility.
>
> All these "green" data centre stories focus on reducing the cooling
> costs. They never discuss the actual server power costs and of course
> never compare having tens of thousands of servers versus having X
> mainframes with comparable compute/IO power.
>
>
>
>
> Perhaps the millenium generation has never heard of mainframe computers
> that can run linux and really think the only way to scale things is to
> just had thousnads more PCs in your data centre.
>
> You'll note that established mature companies who are not flush with
> cash like the millenium companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple,
> Twitter etc) do not run out and build data centres with 10,000 PCs.
>
> If there were a truly objective "green" study comparing power costs to
> run mainframes against equivaent number of 1U servers (equicalent in
> computer/IO power), what would it show ?
>

I think what's being missed here is the fact that applications like google
and facebook can make very good use of the parallelisation inherent in
multiple cpu / core systems. A mainframe may be more powerfull, but it 
won't
typically scale well to facebook / google type applications, because it's
not designed for highly parallel applications and there's too much required
infrastructure to dynamically scale power consumption. Mainframe is just a
name. right ?. Googles "mainframes" have thousands of cpu boards, each of
which need not be  particularly powerfull, nor draw much power and may be
in hibernate mode or woken up as load varies, almost from query to query. A
much more finely grained division of labour and energy management.

Of course, less cooling requirement must mean that the systems are also more
power efficient as well, so there are gains all round. Air conn is very
wastefull of energy...

Regards,

Chris