Datacenter power consumption has become a major concern in recent years, as utilities struggle to keep up with growing demand and operators are forced

Datacenters bleed watts and cash – all because they're afraid to flip a switch

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2024-09-21 19:30:09

Datacenter power consumption has become a major concern in recent years, as utilities struggle to keep up with growing demand and operators are forced to seek alternative means to keep the lights on.

According to Uptime Institute, curbing energy consumption – and by extension lowering operating costs – could be as simple as flipping the switch on any one of the performance- and power-management mechanisms build into modern systems.

We're not talking about a trivial amount of power either. In a blog post this week, Uptime analyst Daniel Bizo wrote that simply enabling OS-level governors and power profiles could result in a 25 to 50 percent reduction in energy consumption. Scaled across a whole datacenter those savings add up pretty quickly.

Additionally, enabling processor C-states can lead to a nearly 20 percent reduction in idle power consumption. In a nutshell, C-states dictate which aspects of the chip can be turned off during idle periods.