Power Consumption
I believe most people know that data centres are already one
of the major consumers of electricity in the industrialised world; indeed it is
estimated that currently 2% of all electricity consumption goes into IT
applications. According to the European Union the energy consumption of data
centres was 46 Terawatt hours in 2006 and is set to rise to 93 TW hrs by 2020. This
is equivalent to one hundred million 100W light bulbs burning 24 hours a day,
365 days a year.
Typically 40% of the power consumed by data centres is for
the IT load and 35% is for cooling the system. Generally speaking, if a drive
consumes more power it will produce more heat – so power consumption is indeed
a double edged sword. It is no surprise then that a significant proportion of
a data centre’s power consumption goes on servers. I understand cloud based
applications, such as Facebook, are the primary cause of the growth in servers
and the demand for storage space.
If you are a Facebook user, like me and the Reynolds sibs, and
you reside in Europe – this is most probably where your data is click here. Some
interesting Facebook statistics – Facebook has more than 1 Billion monthly
active users, it generates 1 Trillion page views per month and more than 219
Billion photos have been uploaded since launch – amazing! Here is an
interesting video showing the remarkable scale of Facebook’s largest North
American data centre click
here.
My thanks to Anna of Intel for pointing me to the following
Info-graphs –
The following graph uses the typical Power Consumption, when
active, as published in the respective manufacturer’s specification. The value
for the Kingston E100 is calculated as the average of 1.2W (TYP) Read and 2.7W
(TYP) Write.
On the face of it the Intel P3700 has terrible power
consumption characteristics, but this is misleading as we must remember that it
is doing the same level of work as the sum of several typical SSDs, so arguably
we should be dividing its power consumption of 25W by 5 or 6 to get a
comparable result. So, in reality the Intel P3700 has competitive power
consumption characteristics.
Data Reliability
The ‘Unrecoverable Bit Error Rate’ (UBER),as defined by
JEDEC, the global leader in developing open standards for the microelectronic
industry, is a metric for data corruption rate equal to the number of data
errors per bit read after applying any specified error correction method. UBER
= number of data errors / number of bits read. JDEC specifies that the maximum
error rate allowable for an Enterprise level SSS solution is one error in every
10^16 bits read.
Intel specifies an UBER of 1 in 10^17 bits read for the
Intel P3700.
The Intel P3700 has a 5 year warranty and is warranted for 10
Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD).
The Intel P3700 has a comprehensive set of Enterprise
features, which includes power failure support.
Now let’s head to the next page, to look at the
Conclusions of this review…..
