Green Technology

" ... Putting idle servers to sleep when they're not in use is part of University of Michigan researchers' plan to save up to 75 percent of the energy that power-hungry computer data centers consume.... Thomas Wenisch, ... and students David Meisner and Brian Gold will present ... on March 10 at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Washington, D.C."

" ... PowerNap, the plan to put idle servers to sleep, and RAILS, a more efficient power supplying technique. (RAILS stands for Redundant Array for Inexpensive Load Sharing.)"

"Data centers waste most of the energy they draw. The facilities are inefficient because they must be ready for peak processing demands ... typical industrial data center, the average utilization is 20 to 30 percent."

"While PowerNap would require a new operating system to coordinate the instantaneous sleeping and waking, most of the other technologies that would make this possible already exist, Wenisch says."

Via:  University of Michigan Link