Technology Review published an interesting article the other day on some of the innovations Microsoft is rolling out to save energy in its data centres.
Microsoft Research’s Networked Embedded Computing group have developed small sensors sensitive to heat and humidity. The sensors are web-enabled and can be networked and made compatible with Web services.
In Microsoft’s case, what they hope to do is use the sensors to give an accurate heat and humidity map of the data center. Then they will algorithmically decide how many servers they need to keep running, and start putting into sleep mode the servers in the hottest parts of the data center. This reduces the power required for servers, reduces the amount of heat being produced by servers and therefore the amount of cooling the air conditioning needs to do.
This solution will work particularly well for Microsoft, where there may be a lot of duplication amongst server roles but in more typical commercial data centers, you can’t go putting your customer’s servers into sleep mode!
Consequently in Cork Internet eXchange (CIX), the hyper energy-efficient data center which I co-founded we have had to take other innovative approaches to increasing our energy efficiency. I will outline those steps in subsequent posts on this blog.
In the meantime, kudos to Microsoft for coming up with these innovations. How much will it save them?
The group ran simulations using data from the IM service Windows Live Messenger and found that the system could produce about 30 percent in energy savings, depending on the physical structure of the data center and on how the system is configured
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