Cisco Cisco UCS C3160 Rack Server Libro bianco
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IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Data Center Management: The Key Ingredient for Reducing Server Power while Increasing Data Center Capacity
©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com
consumption of the two blade solutions, both under load as well as at idle, using industry-standard
tests including SPECjjb2005
7
and Prime95
8
. SPECjjb2005 is a Java server benchmark used to evaluate
the performance of server-side Java by emulating a three-tier client/server system, measuring the
performance of the CPU, cache, and memory. Prime95 is a well-known computer “torture test”
intended to run a computer at top compute capacity by repeatedly calculating prime numbers for as
long as needed.
PT tested both power usage and performance per watt for both vendors. While reporting all of the test
PT tested both power usage and performance per watt for both vendors. While reporting all of the test
results is beyond the scope of this paper, PT did report the following key findings:
1. The Cisco blade solution achieved up to 10.7% more SPECjjb2005 bops/Watt than the HP
blade solution;
2. Cisco blades used 10.2% less power per blade than the HP blade solution when running the
Prime95 torture tests;
3. The Cisco blade solution used 3.3% less power per blade when idle, compared with the HP
blade solution.
Figure : Project Power Savings for the Cisco UCS Blade Solution Compared with HP Blades (source: Principled Technologies)
These findings are significant. As an example, consider the Prime95 test results. The Cisco blades used
38.6 watts less, per blade, than HP. Extrapolating these savings out to a 500 server data center, these
savings add up to 169,165 kilowatt hours per year ((38.6 watts * 500 servers * 8766 hours/year) / 1000).
Also consider that for every watt saved at the server, another watt in heating and cooling is saved, and
the total becomes 338,330 kWh.
Using the January 2010 commercial electricity rate of 9.58 cents per kWh calculated by the United
Using the January 2010 commercial electricity rate of 9.58 cents per kWh calculated by the United
States Department of Energy
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, this calculates out to $32,412 in annual energy savings—and that is
only comparing blades. Keep in mind that these figures are for fully loaded blades, so these figures
are clearly “best case” calculations. Also consider the additional savings from the significantly reduced
network hardware with Cisco due to the utilization of converged I/O architecture and the savings can
even be higher.
7
http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/
8
http://www.mersenne.org/
9
http://www.eia.doe.gov/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html