This is far more complicated than this. That's why I suggested the Datacenters list. A lot is determined not just by your revenue target per square foot, but cooling, your distribution, your breaker density and sizing, etc. -M< -- Martin Hannigan (c) 617-388-2663 VeriSign, Inc. (w) 703-948-7018 Network Engineer IV Operations & Infrastructure hannigan@verisign.com
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Nils Ketelsen Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 2:09 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Energy consumption vs % utilization?
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 01:52:51PM -0400, Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy wrote:
Sorry, this is somewhat OT.
Also Sorry, but I think the question itself is completely flawed.
I'm looking for information on energy consumption vs percent utilization. In other words if your datacenter consumes 720 MWh per month, yet on average your servers are 98% underutilized, you are wasting a lot of energy (a hot topic these days). Does anyone here have any real data on this?
What does 98% underutilized mean?
What is the utilization of a device with fully built out RAM that is used to 100%, when the CPU is used 2% only?
What is the utilization of a system, that uses two percent of the memory and two percent of the available CPU time, when the policy of the top secret organization owning this system requires, that the application is running on a seperated machine?
Sure many machines might be (computing power wise) able to handle Firewalling, Routing, Webserving, Database Serving, Mailserving and storing accounting data, but still there might be very good reasons to seperate these on different machines.
If you take points like policy requirement (see above: an application might by policy utilize a machine to 100%), different types of resources, failover etc. into account, you might end up with different numbers then just looking at the CPU (and I have the feeling that is what you did or were intending to do).
Actually I think nobody does calculate "real" utilization, as there are a lot of soft factors to be taken into account.
Nils