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Shortage of Electricity Drives Data Center Talks
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."
When Google goes down, productivity probably goes up.
One thing that needs to be looked at with the congregation of data centers is why are they like that? Here in the North East, any kind of bandwidth will cost an arm and a leg compared to the North West area. I've recently been involved in pricing out Colocations for one of our webservers and a simple T1 costs 4-5 times in the N.E. that it costs in the N.W. I'm sure we'd see more evenly distributed data centers if costs we evenly distributed too. How about taking some of those new 40% efficiency solar panels and moving some data centers down to the S.W. for a start?
Locals and guest workers would be hired to pedal for one-hour shifts each, generating some portion of the needed power and giving a boost to the local economy. Don't think "galley" -- think "self-sustaining"!
If you'd like to use this idea, please contact me via my Slashdot account. Thanks.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Given the abundance of geothermal power in iceland (hence why aluminium ore is transported there for refinement) perhaps a few trucks of fibre need to be put in place - Reykjavik becoming the next big hub for data centers... Lots of power on tap, lots of cooling easily available (ie its bloody freezing there), and the good old days of meetings in hot tubs could come back too - though obviously thermal springs rather than hot tubs....
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Google had the right idea when they located their datacenter in Oregon, in a colder climate so they don't need as much air con power, and right next to a big hydro power plant.
What's the point of locating your datacenter in an area with high ground prices, a history of electric power supply problems and a hot climate?
You gotta remmeber that, when a blackout hits a huge swath of area, it also brings down the *client machines* in that area as well, so your backup centre doesn't necessairily have to handle your entire peak load.
Google only needs one of two redundant data centers (one in the East, one in the West, one Mid-Central) to basically ensure they can whether any power loss scenario. If they had 3 such separate centers (which I have no doubt they already have), the only way they're going to be totally off line is if the whole national grid goes down - in which case Google should be the least of your worries if you're a lawmaker.
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.