Maximising Server Efficiency

When it comes to server optimisation we like to do things properly. That’s why we have a dedicated research team exploring the effects of configuration on server performance and efficiency to inform the services that we provide our customers.  

The Impact of Data Centres  

Whilst data centres are the backbone of our modern society, hosting everything that we search for online, as well as the Internet of Things, they are currently highly unsustainable and inefficient. Data centres consume 1-2.4% of our global power consumption (up from 0.2% 20 years ago) and produce as much CO2 as the aviation industry. 

They also put a lot of strain on local infrastructure, including the hardware within the data centre – this technology is often both underutilised and highly-inefficient, as well as incorrectly provisioned, even though the bulk of power is directed towards these devices.  

Historically, the data centre industry has been very siloed and risk averse, with each section or department looking at changes individually and this may lead to dramatic negative impacts for other areas of the data centre.  

These changes could include reducing cooling to save on energy costs and carbon spend, however this could have catastrophic impacts on the lifespan and performance of the hardware.  

At Techbuyer, we aim to look at the entire data centre, and how changes can be applied that have a net positive impact across the entire system. And this is where our research team comes in.  

The Research We Do 

Our research has, so far, covered the effect of BIOS settings and memory configurations on server performance and energy efficiency, with two research papers published on these topics.  
We benchmark server performance under different conditions, settings and configurations within our bespoke wind server testing tunnel, designed and built by Dr. Kat Burdett.  
Within this wind tunnel we can mimic the environment in which a server will be run in a data centre by controlling temperature and pressure across the device. We can remove unwanted variables for full accuracy and control when benchmarking performance.  

How Many RAM Slots Should I Fill? 

We ran benchmarks on two 15th Gen Dell PowerEdge servers with 2nd Gen AMD processors and memory between 64GB and 512GB RAM, although the results are applicable to other server builds.  

Findings show the greater the percentage of memory channels occupied, the greater the performance and efficiency increases. There is an increase in power as we increase the number of DIMMs, but the increased performance stills means a net improvement in efficiency. 

With this in mind, the more RAM slots that you fill, the more efficiently your device will run as the CPU has access to all channels that it is capable of reaching simultaneously. This means that, for a more efficient device, to install 512GB of RAM into your device, you are better installing 8x64GB DIMMs in place of a two 256GB stick of RAM. It is like taking an eight-lane motorway and closing all but two lanes.  

We continued to run tests within different scenarios and under different loads. For a full rundown of our research and findings, access our research paper here.  

What This Means for Our Customers 

Our research isn’t just a nice to have, it forms the backbone of the server configurations that we build for our customers and the recommendations we make for best practice.  

When you work with Techbuyer to create your ideal server configuration, built for your unique workload and business structure, we apply the findings of our research team to ensure that you get the best device across all metrics, without compromise – performance, efficiency, cost and environmental impact.  

Contact our team to begin your server configuration using the form below or find out more about our server configuration service and the research behind this service here.