It is no secret that powerful data centers, like the ones operated by Google and Yahoo, soak up a great deal of energy.
Samsung Says DDR3 and solid-state drives can lower server energy use by 10 percent
By 2011, in fact, data centers in the United States are expected to consume 3 percent of the nation’s electricity – in other words a substantial amount of power. With that energy use will come greenhouse gas emissions.
Finding new data center efficiencies is a multi-front effort. Some companies hope to achieve new efficiencies in the equipment used to cool these information-crunching facilities. Others hope to supply green electricity from renewable sources.
On Tuesday, Samsung suggested an approach that relies on cutting-edge memory chips that do more with less power. Samsung is a maker of memory chips, so it is no surprise the company would focus here. But its arguments are worth considering.
The South Korean company says that if data-center servers used its latest DDR3 memory in place of the DRAM chips commonly used today and solid-state drives based on NAND flash memory instead of hard disk drives the power savings could top 10 percent.
Driving the effectiveness of DDR3 is 40-nm manufacturing, which creates smaller circuits that reply on less electricity.
While concerns over reliability and longevity have dogged the adoption of solid-state drives, replacing a hard disk with SSD can cut power use by 70 percent, the company said. Higher costs have also held back the market.
Still, with energy use a growing concern at data centers large and small, server memory may indeed come to play a role in lowering power needs. And it may happen sooner rather than later.
