Evaluating Energy and Performance for Server-Class Hardware Configurations

The improvement for energy efficiency has been increasingly becoming a major consideration in server and data center design, especially for the power-hungry ones. Numerous studies have provided various new methods or proposals for the building of "green" server and data center, but this paper concentrates on how different configuration schemes in a server effect practical performance and power consumption for specific applications. It is completely necessary to obtain thin provisioning for the particular applications to meet performance requirements with minimal energy consumption. This paper evaluates the different hardware configurations' impact on energy consumption and performance for typical applications, hoping for offering evidences or clues to subsequent researches. The File Bench is used to generate four sever workloads and ZH-101 is employed to collect relevant real-time power consumptions. Our result shows that different workloads need different hardware configurations at the demands of both energy-efficiency and performance. And running multiple workloads on a reduced hardware configuration is a wise choice.