Data cooler: A Google data center in Oregon that makes use of evaporative cooling.
John Nelson (rooftop65)
Custom datacenters can help lower energy consumption, experts say.
Cloud computing may raise privacy and security concerns, but this growing practice--offloading computation and storage to remote data centers run by companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo--could have one clear advantage: far better energy efficiency, thanks to custom data centers now rising across the country.
"There are issues with property rights and confidentiality that people are working out for mass migration of data to the cloud," says Jonathan Koomey, an energy-efficiency expert and a visiting professor at Yale University. "But in terms of raw economics, there is a strong argument," he adds. "The economic benefits of cloud computing are compelling."
The issue of surging worldwide IT-related energy consumption is both a bottom-line concern to the companies involved and, increasingly, an environmental worry. Energy consumption from data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005--from 0.5 percent to 1 percent of world total electricity consumption. That figure, which currently stands at around 1.5 percent, is expected to rise further. According to a study published in 2008 by the Uptime Institute, a datacenter consultancy based in Santa Fe, NM, it could quadruple by 2020.
"Having energy consumption go from one to three percent in five to ten years, if that goes on, we are in big trouble," says Kenneth Brill, Uptime Institute executive director. Unless this growth is checked, greenhouse gas emissions will rise, and "the profitability of corporations will deteriorate dramatically," he adds.
Cloud-computing companies hope to offer a solution by focusing on energy efficiency within massive data centers.
Yahoo, for example, broke ground on a data center near Buffalo, NY, last month that will use as little as one-quarter the electricity of older data centers, says Scott Noteboom, senior director of data center engineering at the company. Once finished, the servers inside this data center will be more efficient from a computational standpoint--using less power when they are performing fewer computations--and the building itself will mainly exploit natural air flows to keep hot servers cool. On days above 27° C, managers will switch on air conditioning, which in this case employs evaporative cooling, that should only need to be used 212 hours per year.
Virtual private clouds bridge real and virtual computing infrastructure.
A startup hopes to make it easier to hop between cloud-computing services.
Google has revealed many of their secrets of how they answer a query using only 1kJ of energy. While it would be a good trade-secret to help stay ahead of competitors, they observe that if everyone had data centers as efficient as theirs it would save as much electricity as is used by all households in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. We are all stuck here on the same planet, so it doesn't really help to let your neighbors be wasteful.
http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/
They have pushed vendors to build 12V only motherboards and simpler more efficient power supplies and batteries (eliminating UPS losses).
In total, the data centers at Google use only 1.19 times as much energy (the PUE) as is used by the useful chunks of their servers- CPU, memory, networking. Most data centers use about twice as much power as the useful bits of the computers. This is due to careful attention to all parts of the machine, and a lot of evaporative cooling.
Anytime you walk in to a data center and hear the roar of 100,000 little box fans, you gotta know something is deeply wrong...
Good article, but I want to say one thing that VM could be an effective part of a cloud solution, rather than just a gap-stopper. VMs are especially crucial for leveraging under-utilized hardware and for disaster recovery. They can be used to enhance a cloud but are certainly not required.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
ms
190 Comments
telecom energy use?
I often see articles like this considering the energy usage of data centers. But I don't ever see an estimate of the energy needed to move the data through the net. Is that because (a) it's negligible, or (b) it's not easy to determine, or (c) something else? I suspect the answer is very dependent on the ratio of the amount of data to the amount of computation. But, even at the end-user terminus, I notice that my DSL modem is just as warm as my laptop (and the same goes for the "bricks" powering them). And the end user is just the tip of the iceberg--routers and transmission equipment require energy as well.
Reply
carlhage
84 Comments
Re: telecom energy use?
The comment about download vs physical CDs comes from a recent paper coauthored by Koomey, and includes the method to estimate telecom (internet) energy usage using the method described in a paper on CO2 emissions of internet advertising. They use energy usage reported by regulated voice service, mapped to the fraction of data vs voice to give 7 kWh/GB for 2008. That's a surprisingly high number-- the TV ads with DSL turtles touting 50Mbps cable don't mention this works out to 22GB/h = 157kW! (BTW, my cable provider's website is so slow it makes my DSL seem like a 1200b modem. Why bother with high speed internet when the servers suck? Sorry, I had to rant on this-- I got annoyed waiting to find the speed available for their service, obviously not accessing their servers.)
Most of what I have read about on "Green Data Centers" recently has been about reducing the 1.8x overhead for cooling power, or sometimes about virtual servers. However, I never see published benchmarks of typical-use server watts, or web pages per watt-second for servers. My impression is that the aggregate pages/kWh or even peak rate pages/kWh is very low compared to what is possible. (A set of standard benchmarks are needed to define a "page", presumably representative of typical use.)
A new proposed regulation from California requires labeling the power consumed by TVs-- we need the same for computers, including data center service providers. People will often buy an expensive server rationalized on needed (desired) power, and could easily use >10X the energy of an efficient machine (like a laptop). Manufacturers and service providers need to publish typical-use power consumption, then we can choose to be green (or just cheap about total cost) and manufacturers will have an incentive to make them efficient.
Reply
wramthun
1 Comment
Re: telecom energy use?
It's already being done. PG&E was the first energy company to offer its customers rebates for purchasing energy efficient equipment for their data centers.
Also each server manufacturer publishes its server power spec's on their web site. All you have to do is look them up and compare their energy and thermal footprints, and then make an informed purchase.
Reply
kbross
1 Comment
Re: telecom energy use?
There are already efforts under way to measure and improve telecom energy efficiency. Last year, U.S. carriers spent >2 billion dollars on electricity, so the carriers are motivated to seek out more energy efficient equipment.
One of the major efficiency efforts in the telecom space is being undertaken by the ATIS Telecom Energy Efficiency committee (http://www.atis.org/0050/tee.asp). Thus far, TEE has released four specifications that have become ANSI-approved standards:
* ATIS-0600015.2009 (General Requirements)
* ATIS-0600015.01.2009 (Servers)
* ATIS-0600015.02.2009 (Transport Equipment)
* ATIS-0600015.03.2009 (Routers & Ethernet Switches)
Several more specifications are in the works, and some of these may touch on the "customer premises" equipment that customers see.
AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, and Sprint have been among those active in the development of these standards (along with numerous equipment providers). Stay tuned for more from ATIS TEE.
--kb
Reply