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."

Comments

Nothing FP

[Anonymous Coward]

When Google goes down, productivity probably goes up.

Data Center Congregation

[Lanu2000]

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?

Iceland needs a really big pipe....

[simm1701]

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....