Technology

The Problem Of Power Consumption In Servers.

Capabilities of servers and their power consumption have increased over time. Multiply the power servers consume by the number of servers in use today and power consumption emerges as a significant expense for many companies. The main power consumers in a server are the processors and memory. Server processors are capping and controlling their power usage, but the amount of memory used in a server is growing and with that growth, more power is consumed by memory. In addition, today s power supplies are very inefficient and waste power at the wall socket and when converting AC power to DC. Also, when servers are in operation, the entire chassis will heat up; cooling is required to keep the components at a safe operating temperature, but cooling takes additional power.

Require a Solution
Electricity used by servers has doubled between 2000 and 2005 due to the increase in the number of servers installed and the required cooling equipment and infrastructure. Power use varies by server type, the configuration within each server, and the workload being run. All server components generate heat as they function. An increase of the local ambient temperature inside a server can cause reliability problems with the circuitry. As data centres move towards increased server density, the power and heat generated by servers will increase. On a basic server system today, server processors consume the most power, followed by memory, then disks or PCI slots, the motherboard, and lastly the fan and networking interconnects. The recent shift to multi-core processors helps address energy consumption by the CPU and adds power management features that throttle processor power A Technology is Require to deal with this problem and among various solution the Most favorable solution would be SmoothStone Technology .

What Is SmoothStone Technology?

Power consumption matters more than ever. Smooth-Stone will bring the low-power virtues of mobile phone technology to servers and data centres. Its semiconductors and software will provide a solution for companies where energy consumption by servers has become a constraining and expensive issue.

Why Smooth Stone Technology needed?

IT has revolutionised our possibilities for productivity, efficiency and communication but has environmental consequences Data centres for long have been power hoggers.And IT power consumption and consumption of IT products is increasing. A texas based technology known as SmoothStone Technology will be use to address this serious problem.

Origin of Smooth Stone Technology

A group of investors, including companies from the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates, has formed in a bid to disrupt one of Intel s most lucrative franchises. The companies have put $48 million into Smooth-Stone, a start-up based in Austin, Tex.

How Smooth Stone Technology works?

Smooth-Stone has set to work with the ARM(32-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computer ) chips found in the most popular smart phones to handle jobs typically done on server computers. . Servers do heavy work running business software and require serious horsepower. As it happens, chips based on Intel s architecture have such horsepower and tend to run faster than anything else on the market. These chips churn away inside 90 percent of the servers sold every year, leaving 10 percent of the market for specialized chips made to handle mainframe-like operations.

Pros and Cons

Pros Reduce power costs Save money Cons Possible wear and tear on hardware. Response time Possible confusion to end users.

Great for data centres with surges in workload, and still useful for HPC centres with constant backlog

What SmoothStone Technology can do?

Lower down the electricity bills,the team leverages the mobile phone microprocessors inside the high powered computer servers used in data centres. Monitoring and reporting. Power Management and workload Consolidation. Scheduling based on Cost,Temperature and Energy Efficiency.

Stiff Competition
The headlines Smooth-Stone has already garnered, Start-up Aims to Slay Chip Goliath, and, An atom bomb aimed at Intel, suggest the technology will be available soon and effortlessly. But the reality is it might take a while. The company faces stiff competition and several daunting technological challenges in its quest to build good server chips using mobile phone processing cores. There are already companies developing such chips, including Marvell Technology and a company Google recently acquired, Agnilux, which could have products out soon.

Problems Concerning Smooth Stone

The problem Smooth-Stone is trying to solve is serious, especially in the new world of cloud computing, which is requiring more data centers. The powerful processors inside data center servers require a lot of electricity to run and give off a lot of heat. That heat leads to even more power use in data centers via the air conditioners and other cooling methods used to keep them from overheating and shutting down. The most popular processors used inside mobile phones, and the ones Smooth-Stone and others are aiming to use in servers, come from Arm, a company with a keen focus on low-energy processors for devices that need batteries. But Arm's focus on mobile phones also means there are limitations the chips will have to overcome, mainly in software and calculating speeds. The software issue is the more serious of the two because many programs for servers are written to run on x86-based processors and would have to be rewritten for Arm's RISC-based (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) chips. It's not a major challenge, but it would add cost and time to the effort.

Survival of SmoothStone Seems Difficult

Marvell plans to launch its first server chips with Arm cores later this year. And it has put multiple Arm processing cores inside its server chips to better compete against those made by Intel, a strategy other companies could use. Marvell will put out a quad-core chip based on Arm's Cortex-A9 processors to compete with Intel on speed. "The server market, which is currently dominated by x86 processors, continues to be plagued by concerns of growing power consumption. Marvell, by exploiting ARM's low-power technology, hopes to make inroads into the server territory with its new offering that promises a fivefold reduction in power consumption and an on-par performance compared with an x86 processor," . Smooth Stone technology will have a tough competition to withstand in the market with different developments taking place in the various spheres .

Thankyou !!!