Adam Lesser

The case for low-power servers in the modern data center

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Introduction: the energy equation for data centers
  3. Low-power servers: the chip
  4. Everything around the chip
  5. Storage and the low-power server
  6. Should Intel be worried?
  7. About Adam Lesser

1. Summary

How do data-center-dependent companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook reduce their power bill and — if they’re environmentally conscious — their carbon footprint? Though focusing on cooling costs and measuring power usage effectiveness (PUE) are the most common measures, the server itself could be designed to use less power.

With that possibility now looming, a number of  players are jumping in, from startups trying to engineer power-efficient fabrics to established chip makers like Intel that are working on lower-power processors. The race is on to see if data-center hardware can be cost-effectively implemented with a residual lowering of overall power use.