Data Center Handbook, 2nd Edition

18DESIGN OF ENERGY‐EFFICIENT IT EQUIPMENT

Chang‐Hsin Geng

Super Micro Computer, Inc., San Jose, California, United States of America

18.1 INTRODUCTION

Computing has changed a lot since its earliest days. The cell phone we hold in our hands has more computing power than the computer used on the Apollo 11 that landed on moon in 1969. Not only has the computing power increased substantially, but also the size of the computer has decreased substantially. In the early years of computing, most people were less concerned with the impact of computer power usage. In those times, improving the performance of compute, storage, and network were the main goals regardless of energy consumption. Today, computing resources are in use in all facets of life including communication, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), manufacturing, Governments, and many other industries. As of today, energy efficiency has become the new mantra but each industry has its own definition and use case. For example, a compute server may be running continuously at a high load, whereas an IoT server may be asked to do something intermittently. Every architecture in computer systems can be made more energy‐efficient from design to operation to end of life. In this chapter, we will delve into the process to enable energy‐efficient IT equipment and the concept of the design.

18.1.1 History of the Energy‐Efficient IT Equipment

ENERGY STAR® was a program launched in 1992 by the U.S. Environment ...