Microsoft's newest Green IT project envisions automatically putting low-power servers to sleep when they're not needed, and waking them up when work needs to be done. The payoff could eventually be substantial.
The New York Times
reports that Microsoft's project, Marlowe, is named after the detective Philip Marlowe, the hero of the book "The Big Sleep," and other novels by Raymond Chandler. The project uses Atom chips, which consume only about one-tenth the power of an Intel Xeon server chip. They can only perform about a quarter of the work of a Xeon chip, so Microsoft is experimenting to find out the optimum number of chips to use in order to balance power consumption with computing power.
So where does the sleep come in? Servers typically do less work at night, and more work during the day, when people log onto email, visit Web pages, run enterprise applications, and so on. So Microsoft has been using software to learn when server load is highest and when it's lowest, and put microprocessors to sleep, or wake them up, depending on demand. The Times reports:
When the software senses a lull in action, it can place large numbers of servers into sleep or hibernate modes so that they consume just 2 to 4 watts instead of the usual 28 to 37 watts. Then, in an ideal set-up, the software can anticipate when more active periods will resume and begin waking up the servers ahead of the incoming search requests. It usually takes the servers about 5 to 45 seconds to jump back into action.
It's not ready today. But when it is, you'll certainly want it in your data cente
