10 Rack Server Configurations That Slash Data Center Energy Bills
10 Rack Server Configurations That Slash Data Center Energy Bills

10 Rack Server Configurations That Slash Data Center Energy Bills

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First, imagine the usual server cabinet found in most data centers. It can be an untidy mess of various equipment and equipment stacked in a cupboard in a disordered manner. When you try to achieve the optimum arrangement of the rack to enable efficient utilization of energy, then you get a touch of the magic. 

It is possible to reduce energy bills to a great extent provided the right form and type of rack server configurations are adopted. Intrigued? 

If you continue reading this article, you will get 10 rack designs to save power.

1. Carefully Selecting Hardware Components   

This is a fallacy because every piece that goes into creating a rack server configuration is important. First, select those server models that are equipped with the newest microprocessors. The newest generation of the CPUs sometimes offers similar or even superior performance at lower amperages to older chips. For other components like power supplies, look for those that have an 80 Plus certification or higher with at least bronze efficiency. 

Also, select memory, storage, and network cards as new as having lower energy consumption than previous models. When compiled with others, each of these marginal strives manages to bring down the general power usage by a very significant margin.

2. Configuring for Maximum Airflow

Another important aspect of rack design is air flow as it is not beneficial to have too much heat as it affects energy consumption. First, place the workhorse servers, which require powerful cooling, at the bottom of the layout. 

Cool air intake is normally from the lower front of the rack; therefore, hot air rising above the down-oriented servers gets captured by fans that are positioned up high. Also, there should be 1-2 vertical spaces between gears to facilitate the movement of air between the gear and the air. 

3. Right-sizing Power Delivery

When equipping a data center rack, make certain there is adequate power provision without going overboard in estimating the requirements. First, add up the total nameplate rating of all the equipment. 

Next, add a contingency or extra or safety margin, which is usually rated at 20-30% more than the base capacity. This includes voltage spikes, future expansion, and PSU inefficiencies. When the target power budget is decided, opt for suitable uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) of the corresponding capacity. 

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4. Eco Modes and C-states 

Many present-day servers have inherent parameters to regulate energy consumption when the loads are light. The Processor C-States are the various idle states that the cores may assume when they are not in use. C-state is that CPUs shift from full-speed processing to a range of C-states and vice versa. Dedicated servers have ample time unused since workloads in the data center vary and are not constant throughout the day. 

5. Using Higher-Efficiency Operating Systems

Another aspect of a computing environment is the server operating system which affects energy consumption. I agree with the authors’ conclusion that for most of the workloads, Linux offers at least comparable performance and often a better one at lower power consumption than Windows. The Linux kernel is lighter in memory usage than the Windows operating system; it has enhanced process and resource management and support for C-States. 

6. Installing Advanced Power Management

IT teams can capitalize on energy optimization to the next level with intelligent power management platforms. 

Some of these solutions include the Cisco Energy Management Suite which includes rack server sensors and software that regulates component-level consumption. It singled out current and past information feeds and highlighted where to fine-tune structures for optimization. Managers can turn off unnecessary supply and network paths during low demand and also control the lighting. 

7. Carefully Configuring Virtual Machines

Informed administrators do understand that arranging services on potent hosts through virtualization saves expenditure. 

  • However additional savings come from purposefully spreading the VMs depending on their usage patterns. 
  • Coupled virtual servers demanding significant compute, memory, or storage often compel the host hardware to work at optimal power all the time, or else be deemed inefficient and unprofitable. 
  • Move these noisy neighbor VMs into separate hosts where they do not affect other physical servers which can constantly enter low power state. 
  • Next, depopulate and ‘quiet’ VMs with average working loads from the more populated and active groups. 

What proves to be helpful for their underlying hosts is enabling them to employ aggressive power-saving modes during calm periods.

8. Hardware Retire and Repurpose

Undervalued and forgotten Items may be a significantly larger energy consumption in the data center. Servers that were constructed way before the advent of highly integrated multi-core processors consume power proportional to their pathetic performance. 

Similarly, network switches with aging forwarding ASICs also consume more power per gigabit. But storage boxes designed before SSDs or even the current MAID spindown modes just pile tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. Proactively look for old machines and exclude them from the network so that traffic can be moved to more efficient low-power devices. 

9. Using Containerization and Microservices  

Dealing with monolithic software to distribute the functionality into microservices and running them in slim containers also contributes to data center ecology. Containers can put more workloads into multi-tenant hosts since they separate apps and libs. 

Microservices again allow for scaling single functions within the system as and when required. For example, you may have a relatively fast throughput for the checkout container to accommodate a high eCommerce traffic rate and a smaller catalog facet container that is not used as frequently. 

10. Investigating Liquid Cooling Solutions  

Lastly, look at your data center cooling tactics while air cooling is extremely inefficient in terms of energy used to move heat. Liquid cooling systems take water or other liquids to the hot spots on the component and reduce cooling needs by several exponentials. 

Cold plates, immersion baths, door-mounted rack servers, and sealed loop arrangements make direct contact with heat-generating electronic components through the use of natural convection and conduction of fluids. 

The Bottom Line

Small adjustments to the rack bring gross benefits when computing loads increase in the future. The best approach towards the placement of the components and selection of the components from power profiles contributes to the most idle efficiency. It also allows the servers to conserve energy during the supported power-saving attributes and modes. Replacing old hardware, using virtualization to combine applications, and checking into liquid cooling provides more advancements. The smart rack is the key to constructing a power-miserly data center, as has been discussed above.

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