Energy costs bring retooled computers

The struggle against the high cost of energy isn't confined to the fuel pump. A relentless war on energy waste is also raging in computer rooms across corporate America, and the fallout is reshaping the US computer industry.

Bob Doherty is on the front lines.

As manager of computer operations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Doherty oversees a data center with an IBM mainframe and about 225 smaller server computers, all vital to the well-being of hundreds of patients.

"My electric bill two years ago was like $10,000 a month," Doherty said. "In this year, I have seen my electrical bill more than triple." One recent bill was for $35,000.

Computers must be kept cool or they malfunction, and today's computers run so hot that a data center like Doherty's feeds more juice to its air conditioners than to its computers.

Doherty is fighting back. He's deployed sophisticated software to let each server do five times as much work as before, so he can make do with fewer machines.

And he's brought in engineers from Hewlett-Packard Co. who use computers to analyze airflow in his data center. By boosting ventilation at the worst hot spots, Doherty can cut the total cost of cooling the place.

During the last Internet boom, hardly anybody thought about how much electricity a computer uses. But in the past few years, the energy cost of running large data centers has become one of the industry's hottest topics.

It's even affecting national security: The Baltimore Sun recently reported that the National Security Agency's headquarters can't add more computers, because the local electric company has no more power to spare.

But the power crunch has meant a power surge for Advanced Micro Devices Inc. For years, this Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of microprocessors subsisted on the crumbs that fell from the table of industry leader Intel Corp. Things began looking up for AMD when Intel's Itanium chip failed to catch on. Instead, corporate data center managers began clamoring for servers equipped with AMD's cheaper and more versatile alternative, Opteron. Not only did the Opteron run older software that didn't work well on Itanium; it also used less electricity.

Vlad Rozanovich, business development executive at AMD, said the Opteron would consume 20 to 30 watts less in normal use than Intel rivals like the Itanium and a more popular Intel server chip called Xeon. Now multiply that with the thousands of server chips found in the largest data centers. "You're talking hundreds of watts per server . . . and hundreds of thousands of watts per data center," Rozanovich said.

You're also talking about thousands of dollars in lower power bills. Besides, the less power a chip uses, the cooler it runs. So companies save on air conditioning, too.

AMD's efficient chips have made the company a serious rival to Intel. In the fourth quarter of 2004, AMD had 7.4 percent of the market for server chips, according to industry trackers at Mercury Research. A year later, AMD had more than doubled its share, to 16.4 percent. And as of the second quarter of 2006, AMD had over 25 percent of the total market.

Intel is fighting back with new power-stingy chips of its own.

"We're now delivering 40 percent more performance over our previous generation, with 40 percent less power," said Dileep Bhandarkar, senior chip architect for Intel's enterprise computing group. "They had lower power for a little while," Bhandarkar said of AMD, adding those days are over.

Sun Microsystems Inc., makers of high-powered servers running the advanced Unix operating system, sings the praises of its new Niagara processor, designed to use far less juice than earlier Sun chips. The company says its SunFire T2000 delivers twice the computing performance of the previous generation Sun machine, while taking up one-quarter as much space and using one-third as much power.

"We're attacking power efficiency up and down our product line," said David Douglas, a Sun vice president.

One of the biggest players in the campaign to save energy is EMC Corp., the giant data-storage firm in Hopkinton. Its newest Symmetrix DMX-3 high-end storage arrays let users plug in cheaper, slower hard drives that use less power. These can be used for low-priority data, while costlier power-hungry drives in the same machine take care of the most critical information.

"DMX has the lowest total power consumption of any of the storage vendors in the industry," said Bob Wambach, director of Symmetrix product marketing.

But EMC's biggest energy-saving move came in 2004, when it acquired VMware Inc., the leading maker of server virtualization software. Most corporate server computers are used for a single task, such as managing e-mail. But their chips are capable of doing far more. VMware lets them, by putting multiple tasks on a single server. With five or six "virtual servers" on each machine, companies need far fewer computers to accomplish the same tasks. That means less electricity for the servers and air conditioners, since there are fewer machines to cool.

"Every month, every year, they're saving," said Karthik Rau, VMware's senior director of product management, "and it just starts to compound over time."

EMC and other storage firms are applying the same concept to their data-storage gear. They're developing systems that identify all the storage devices in a company, then rearrange data to use the storage most efficiently. That means there's less need to purchase more power-hungry storage hardware.

But individual solutions by separate companies may not be enough. The US House last month passed a bill that would authorize a federal study of energy consumption by data centers, and ways to reduce it. The bill is pending in the Senate.