Ultra-green Power Efficiency

Power efficiency is the most important tool for reducing the total cost of memory in the data center. Over a 3-5 year equipment life, power costs typically dominate capital costs. Even if some equipment is free, it is still too expensive to install and operate. The total power costs include:
 

  • Operating power costs
  • Cooling power costs
  • Electrical conditioning and distribution costs
  • Power protection costs (UPS, back-up generators)


APC performed a Data Center Total Cost of Ownership study in 2005 and came up with the following results and chart for a 1500W rack of equipment. Using this data and factoring in financial costs, the actual cost of a kW over the lifetime of a piece of equipment can be over $40K.

For memory, the important metric is power per GByte. A well designed 64GByte server requires 5W per GByte. Violin Switched Memory (VXM) dramatically lowers power requirements to less than 1W per GByte, an 80% savings. This equates to savings of 4kW per TByte or $160,000 per TByte.

VXM achieves power efficiency through several important techniques: 

  • DRAM power management: DRAM can be operated in many modes. Most memory controllers and systems cannot manage the more complicated lower power modes. VXM was designed to efficiently use these low power modes and still provide the industry’s fastest I/O.
  • Low Power Sockets: Interconnects like FB-DIMM, PCI Express, Fibre Channel and SATA/SAS have signaling and power overheads that typically support sockets of 15 to 50W. VXM was designed for very low power and requires less than 10W per VIMM socket with 5W being typical.
  • Integrated RAID controllers: Unlike storage systems with separate drive arrays and RAID controllers, VXM embeds the RAID controller for maximum performance, density and power efficiency.