Newsflash: Servers Consume More Power Than Missisippians

Dr. Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says that US servers consumed more electricity in 2005 than all Mississippians combined. I read about his AMD-sponsored study on CNET. It reminded me of Nick Carr's calculation that a Second Life avatar uses more power than the average Brazilian.

In his LinuxWorld keynote, AMD's Randy Allen says this is the first time that national and global data center energy usage has been comprehensively analyzed:

* In the US alone, total 2005 usage was 45 billion kWh, resulting in utility bills amounting to $2.7 billion. Worldwide consumption was 123 billion kWh, or $7.2 billion. This represents double the electricity demand in 2000.

* Based on IDC's server shipment forecasts, server-related power usage will increase another 40% by 2010 - if per-server power consumption stays at 2005 levels. But if server power demand grows at past rates, we'll face a 75% increase by 2010.

Dr. Koomey's assessment made me think of Sun's claim that "server performance, power, and space efficiencies are improving at up to 40 percent annually on average and could double every two years". I wonder at what point Koomey's "past growth" trends ended and the efficiency improvements Sun mentioned began?

By the way, Koomey's stats take into account only servers and "supporting infrastructure", such as cooling and lighting. Networking and storage equipment are excluded; Koomey says their power consumption is 1/3 that of servers. (So total = 75% servers + cooling, and 25% networking + storage?) This isn't quite consistent with Cisco's breakdown of 50% cooling, 26% servers + storage, 11% networking and 13% miscellaneous. Or HP's finding that 60% of data center power goes into cooling.

Also interestingly, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Ben Pimentel isn't sure that report's findings are as alarming as AMD makes them out to be. After all, server related electricity consumption was only 1.2% of total US and 0.8% of total world energy usage. Quoting California Energy Commission assistant executive director Claudia Chandler, he says it's an urban myth that the Internet's growth will cause an energy crisis. (This Wired article for instance, mentions 1999 projections by energy analysts Peter Huber and Mark Mills that data centers will consume half of all the world's output of electricity by the end of this decade; now that does seem like an unlikely story.)

But let's look beyond how these numbers add up and try to answer Allan Leinwald's question. We're making ongoing investments on acquiring and operating more, bigger, better servers - but how will we use their computing resources to build new and improved infrastructure and services? Allan points out, for instance, that in the relatively near future, Intel's 80-core processor will be out on the market for a few thousand dollars. Surely they're good for more than the same old unmanaged dedicated servers?

PS - Check out Nick Carr's post on the Koomey report. Two important points: 1.2% of national power consumption is a comparable amount to usage by color TVs. Also, custom built servers, such as those in Google's data centers, weren't considered for the study.