Microsoft studies new ways to turn servers on and off

Microsoft's latest research and development project called ‘Marlowe’ is studying more efficient ways of turning servers off and on during the course of a day.

Microsoft’s project is named after the detective Philip Marlowe, made famous by Mr Chandler in novels like "The Long Goodbye" and “The Big Sleep”, which the software giant had in mind when they came up with the project name. Servers generally stay powered up, ready to be used consuming a lot of energy. However, servers usually have huge fluctuations in demand such as in the morning when people are catching up on e-mail or the evening when people return home from work. With Project Marlowe, Microsoft is looking at trade-offs between using a large amount of Intel Atom chips compared to using Intel Xeon chips. The Intel Atom chips consume one-tenth of power but can only perform one-fourth of the amount of work in the same period of time as Intel Xeon chips. In terms of cost the Intel Atom chip is considerably cheaper than a Intel Xeon. This concept is not new but what is new is that Microsoft has used sophisticated computer learning software on Atom-based servers and has tracked how the servers have handled search requests over a course of a day. The software has the ability to put servers into sleep or hibernation so they consume just 2 to 4 watts instead of 28 to 37 watts. The ideal solution would be for the software to wake up the servers ahead of active periods. It usually takes 5 to 45 seconds for the servers to be ready for action again. Microsoft plan to expand this in the future to share computing capacity across its global data centers. They have announced a new research organisation called Cloud Computing Futures which is dedicated to exploring issues with reducing data center costs Microsoft hope that these type of research projects will potentially give them a competitive edge over competitors like Google, Yahoo and Amazon.