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The design echoes those found in derelict Buffalo-area manufacturing facilities that were built in pre-air-conditioning days and take advantage of prevailing winds coming off Lake Erie. In these facilities, heat sources were placed in the center of the building, where they acted as a natural pump to move air up and out of cupolas and draw cooler air in from the sides. This is very similar to how Yahoo designed its state-of-the-art cloud-computing center, Noteboom says.
"If you want to build systems without chillers, a lot of the lessons can be found in the history before people had them," said Noteboom, who described the project at Technology Review's EmTech@MIT conference yesterday.
Even as IT usage surges, the efficiency of computer devices is getting better, with each successive generation of chips performing more operations with the same amount of energy. "We are raising performance levels with the same power footprints," says Jon Haas, director of the Eco-Technologies Program at Intel.
Koomey adds that moving data to the Internet has helped reduce overall energy consumption. When people surf the Web--downloading pictures from sites like Facebook and videos from YouTube--they guzzle energy as datacenters serve that content. But if you isolate the act of downloading a CD's worth of music, it turns out to be between 40 percent and 80 percent more efficient than acquiring a physical CD, if you take into account the energy inputs involved in manufacturing and transporting the CD, Koomey says.
"Moving bits is inherently environmentally superior to moving atoms," he says. "People worry about energy use of data centers, but they forget that IT enables structural transformation throughout the economy."
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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