Twenty years from now, the common power reticulation and environmental systems will have likely grown out of the many ideas that are emerging from the recognition that current power structures are simply unsustainable. Since all macro trends point towards a tighter supply of electricity in the future, the continuing steady expansion of corporate datacentres will force companies to minimise consumption as much as possible — and, potentially, reward those companies who do with US-style rebates.
Does this mean next-generation datacentres should be designed with wind farms and solar panels on the roof? Perhaps. Certainly — as the state of South Australia recognised recently after learning BHP's Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine would require nearly half the state's power by 2010 — power consumption issues have become intimately linked with business strategies.
Core competency
While many companies are adopting virtualisation software to reduce the number of physical servers they use, in the long term, more efficient equipment designs will dominate efforts to strip down power consumption. Invariably, this requires an absolute step away from the one application, one server (and one power supply) mantra that has guided datacentre design for far too long.
Blade servers, which combine multiple physical servers into a single chassis, have been one major disruptive force in this area. Parkinson sees blade servers as the best long-term design strategy, and envisions the blade chassis as the natural home for network switches and all other types of datacentre equipment.
Does this mean next-generation datacentres should be designed with wind farms and solar panels on the roof?
Because they run multiple servers using a single shared power supply, Parkinson argues, blade servers are inherently more manageable and consume less energy per server than powering each one individually. "It's pooled power," he explains. "Our mantra is that we'll blade everything."
However, simply putting existing servers and CPUs onto blades won't maintain environmental benefits in the long term because although server blades provide efficiencies of scale, their benefits are limited without a fundamental redesign of the components going onto those blades.
Multi-core computing is a major step in this direction, and one that current pundits feel will extend the shelf life of current silicon-based processes for decades to come. "In terms of the general notion that performance is going to increase, this will be manifested in a larger number of cores," explains Jerry Bautista, US-based director of technology management and teraflops research with Intel.
As the head of Intel's 80-core research project, Bautista has seen perhaps farther than anyone into the future of processor design. In his mind, the shift towards multi-core computing presents the biggest disruptor — with the greatest implications for server design into the future.
The 80-core project, also known as the Teraflops Research Chip (TRC), has as its goal the creation of a single chip to deliver a full 1 trillion floating point operations (FLOPS). That's similar performance to...
