Shortage of Electricity Drives Data Center Talks

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 8, 2006 @02:03AM from the let's-get-cold-fusion-licked dept.

Engineer-Poet writes "Per the San Jose Mercury News, competitors such as Google and Yahoo are meeting to discuss the issue of electricity in Silicon Valley. How much of the USA's 4038 billion kWh/year goes into data centers? Enough to make a difference. Data centers are moving out of California to spread the load and avoid a single-point-of-failure scenario. This is a serious matter; as Andrew Karsner (assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy for the Department of Energy) asked, 'What happens to national productivity when Google goes down for 72 hours?' I'm sure nobody wants to know." From the article: "Concern about electricity pricing and volatility has led Microsoft to talk with its network manufacturers about building more efficient servers. IBM and Hewlett-Packard -- which both build data centers -- want to improve efficiency at the facilities. AMD promotes changing the design of data centers to increase airflow to keep the supercomputers cool."

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cooling costs... by archermadness · 2006-12-08 03:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

I was in a seminar a couple of days ago with a data center ops manager from HP. He stated that in a 20,000 sf data center, every degree they lower the temperature of the A/C costs them $200/hr!
Another interesting tidbit for comparison: a typical high-density rack puts out something in the neighborhood of 15KW of heat. An average home electric oven puts out about 7-8KW of heat. So each high-density rack is like having two ovens going full blast, 24x7.