Friday, October 28, 2005

 

Data-Centre Issues Centre Stage

The continuing struggle to deal with processing demand & space/heat/power constraints is getting more air-time. The constant drive in the finance industry for grid/blade farms is not helping either.

Choice quotes from the article:
Power requirements of the top 10% of data centers are growing at over 20%
According to IT infrastructure vendor, West Kingston, R.I.-based American Power Conversion Corp., the total cost of ownership for a rack of servers is between $80,000 to $150,000 per rack, and power consumption accounts for 20% of that cost.
The conclusion:
The old ways of throwing equipment at IT problems -- more air conditioning units, servers, UPS units -- is going to have to be revisited. And IT pros are going to be asked to find more efficient ways to increase reliability and computing capacity.
[emphasis mine]

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Of course, my recommendation would be to move such compute requirements away from their Van Neumann shackles, and go with reconfigurable computing. A large FPGA runs at about 15W compared to about 100W for a chunky CPU, given that and the performance difference of more than 100x, you can easily see the potential for massive compute densities in the data centre. As such, these next generation grids are going to drive analytics capabilities to the next level.
</blatent-plug>

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