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Samsung's New Green RAM Sips Energy, Runs Cooler in Data Centers

<p>At the CeBIT show in Germany last week, the company unveiled its new memory devices that let data centers, especially those operating cloud services, provide more compute power for less energy.</p>

As the world shifts to cloud computing, IT providers are feeling the pinch of data center expenses. With more and more people outsourcing more and more of their tech needs to remote servers, the demand for compute power is skyrocketing.

While companies in every industry are building green data centers to run more servers more efficiently, at the CeBIT show in Germany last week, Samsung unveiled a new type of memory that uses have the energy as other devices.

The company's green DDR3 memory opens up new levels of computing power even within energy-strapped data centers.

In an article at IDG, David Price writes:

Samsung had set up [at CeBIT] a working model with standard 50nm DDR3 memory on the left and its two flavours of 30nm Green DDR3 on the right. A readout showed that while the 50nm setup was burning 100W, the 2Gb and 4Gb models were using just 60W and 40W respectively, more than halving the energy usage.
As well as reducing power consumption, the 30nm memory keeps operating temperatures lower. While the 50nm memory ran at around 59 degrees Centigrade, the 30nm setups hovered around 53 and 50 degrees respectively.

In an article describing the technology at Computerworld, Samsung's Sylvie Kadivar writes that the green DDR2 memory can use 86 percent less energy in a 48 gigabyte server, and that the savings scale as the computing density increases.

However, to better gauge this at the system level, let us compare the power scenario for a specific 42U server rack comprising four enclosures per rack with 16 servers in a single enclosure for a total of 64 servers or blades per rack. The above mentioned configuration equates to system-level power savings of about 44% -- from 390 watts to just 220 watts.
The 44% saving at the server level equates to significant TCO benefits in the enterprise space: Through the use of Green DDR3, buyers can increase server resources 80% without needing to increase the power budget. In a 2000W power envelope, Green DDR3 allows for placing nine servers on a single rack instead of five. The savings become even more significant when one factors operating costs. For example: In a 1,000-server farm, only 112 racks would be needed instead of 200, cutting overhead costs proportionately by more than $60,000.
Moving to a Green DDR3 provides yearly energy savings of 2.98 Megawatt hours of electrical power per year per server, which amounts to an annual dollar savings of $194,000 per 1,000 servers. That much money would allow the purchase of another 55 servers after just one year of use. Or, simply result in a power cut of 3,000 megawatt hours over the same period of time.

Samsung has already begun including its green DDR memory in some Fujitsu servers, and the company plans to announce more partners for the new technology next month.

Photo CC-licensed by West McGowan.

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