TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

(Server) Clunkers for Cash?

Eric Lundquist | Date: 06-11-09 | Comments

Congress is wrangling with legislation to spur auto sales and remove old clunkers from the road. Would such a plan also work in the server room?

Recently the House of Representatives passed a "Cash for Clunkers" piece of legislation aimed at getting older, less efficient autos off the road and replacing those clunkers with new, fuel-efficient vehicles. Would a program like that work in the server room? Would it work in your server room?

The Detroit Free Press has a good article on the legislation�no jokes please about Detroit needing all the help it can muster. The legislation is a bit involved and the Senate is pushing its own version, but, as the Press states, here is the summary, "If your old car or truck gets less than 18 m.p.g., you can qualify for a voucher of $3,500-$4,500 toward a new one, but the old one has to go the shredder." The new wheels have to get 22 mpg or better. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the legislation would generate sales of more than 600,000 new cars.

So what about a "cash for server clunkers" program? Traditionally servers were engineered for reliability rather than efficiency. From the power supplies that operated in an always-on, nonprogrammable mode to applications that kept disks spinning and resources draining regardless of compute demand, servers happily chugged away at 10 to 15 percent efficiency. Those servers in turn spewed heat, which of course had to be cooled via expensive server rooms with their own air conditioning units. Yes, this is all changing, but anyone who thinks there aren't a whole lot of old servers still chugging away hasn't walked by a data center lately.

While there has been some movement toward efficient IT systems (see http://www.epeat.net), a clunker program could accelerate the trend.

So what should the efficiency ratings be for servers? I'm looking for help here, but in the end all servers are designed around electricity in and computing power out. If you try to make this too complicated, it will never work. The engineers at Google and Microsoft and IBM have been doing lots of work around building big data centers, and they have access to a lot of information about efficiency. Unfortunately, that information is too often considered proprietary. How about sharing the information? What do you think, does cash for server clunkers make sense?