Data Center Power Strain: Problems and Solutions

• By Liam Eagle on August 08, 2007

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This week, the US Environmental Protection Agency released an alarming, possibly alarmist, report on power consumption by data centers. A very thorough retelling of the material found in the report is available in this Computerworld article.

  Here is a somewhat more concise summary:

  - Data centers and server equipment currently consume approximately 61 billion kilowatt hours in the US - approximately 1.5 percent of the nation’s power usage.

  - That amount doubled from 2000 to 2006, and is expected to double again by 2011 at current rates of growth.

  - At that rate, the US would need to build 10 new electric power plants during that period in order to meet the energy demand.

  The environmental impact of IT technology is a topic that comes up quite frequently here at the WHIR. And it’s something I’ve personally pondered quite a bit. While it’s well out of my realm to offer any insight into the accuracy of the EPA’s numbers, I think it’s a fairly reasonable assumption to assume that the largest growth took place during the last two years, as technology phenomena like BitTorrent and YouTube made the distribution of video material commonplace, and led to the consumption of considerably more computing and network resources.

  It’s probably not outrageous to imagine that those technologies aren’t the richest or most resource-hungry applications that we’ll see in the immediate future. I couldn’t really speculate as to whether the prediction for the future is conservative. But I can say with a fair degree of certainty that it is relevant.

  Part of the impetus for the EPA report seemed to be the proposing of solutions to the escalating energy consumption situation. The US could escape a future energy crisis, says the EPA, if data center operators and IT managers consider this a reason, and an opportunity, to reinvent their architectures around energy efficient technologies.

  And the EPA has it’s own agenda (protecting the environment) to promote. According to the Computerworld article:

  “There are efforts under way by industry groups and the EPA to develop a metric to allow IT managers to compare power use against workloads for these lower-end servers. The EPA is also interested in seeing development of a standard that would allow IT managers to measure the total power consumption against the power consumed inside a data center, giving data center managers a benchmark to use.”

  The EPA report has seen quite a bit of coverage up to this point, and the beginnings of what I can only assume will be a somewhat widespread reaction.

  The Green Grid, an environmental .org-type organization becoming fairly well known to the Web hosting faithful, apparently held a webcast Tuesday to outline its own intentions as far as making data centers more energy efficient.

  I didn’t see the webcast, nor can I find a place to view it after the fact. But I am interested in the Green Grid’s progress. It will be interesting to see if its members produce a truly unified vision, or if there is a potential for self-interest to get in the way of progress.

 

UPDATE: The PR folks at the Green Grid sent me a link to an archived version of the webcast. If you'd like to watch it, you can do so here.

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