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Server Power Consumption Doubled Over Past 5 years
Watt's up writes "A new study shows an alarming increase in server power consumption over the past five years. In the US, servers (including cooling equipment) consumes 1.2% of all the electricity in 2005, up from 0.6% in 2000. The trend is similar worldwide. 'If current trends continue, server electricity usage will jump 40 percent by 2010, driven in part by the rise of cheap blade servers, which increase overall power use faster than larger ones. Virtualization and consolidation of servers will work against this trend, though, and it's difficult to predict what will happen as data centers increasingly standardize on power-efficient chips." We also had a recent discussion of power consumption in consumer PCs that you might find interesting.
Well, I blame Al Gore ... for inventing the Internet in the first place.
By definition the 0.6% increase in the fraction of electricity used by servers was matched by a 0.6% decrease in the fraction used by everything else, so everything is good.
How dare you blame the man who has ridden the mighty moon worm!
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
>> Sun's David Douglas, VP Eco Responsibility, estimates that the
>> cost of running computers (power use) will exceed the cost of
>> buying computers in about 5 years
i think if you're running linux/intel it's already the case.
maybe the cost of sun's hardware is so high that the problem is still 5 years out for them.
"This baby is only six months old and she already has one head and two arms; if these trends continue, she'll have 4 heads and 8 arms by the time she's two!"
sic transit gloria mundi
But compared to other computers, blade servers have a higher density of processors to other expenses (especially if you include server space), so your $100K buys more CPUs. I know it's certainly arguable which is the most relevant metric, but look at it this way: the Eniac pulled 150,000 watts. Since computers are so much more efficient now, the total burden from computers must have fallen, right? Wrong. Because the economics now allow google to run 200K computers (a guess, since it's a secret). Sure, if google had to run on Enacs, it would have to be plugged straight into the sun. But the total amount of computation "required" is not fixed after all.
There's no problem in the world that can't be made better the simple stroke of the pen, right?
There's your problem, right there. You are thinking on such a short time scale. If you look back 100 years, the amount of electricity being used by computers is INFINITELY more than before. In no time at all, COMPUTERS WILL USE ALL THE ELECTRICITY IN THE UNIVERSE.
Clearly this is a problem. Think about it - those electrical cords have two wires. Electricity comes in one side, swirls around your computer for a bit, heating things up and showing you devil images, then it goes out the other wire, "to the ground", where SATAN lives. I am sure all that electricity "juice" is polluting our groundwater and causing all the hideous mutations we see today. Wasn't one of earliest large-scale electric projects the TVA, and isn't Tennessee where Al Gore, the ARCHITECT of Global Warming, is from?
And who would benefit from Warm Weather - that's right, SATAN. And Nashville is the home of country music, associated with BANJO MUSIC, need I say more? Sure Al says he is against global warming, but that is just reverse psychology. There is a reason why clueless Tonight Show "Jaywalkers" didn't recognize his photo, but knew he was up to no good.
All the juice in the universe must be a lot - so... when it all seeps into the ground, WHAMO, the whole thing will burst open, unleashing the daemons of the netherworld (which has nothing to do with Netherlands, it's cold there, right now)!
Disclaimers:
All facts taken out of context on purpose.
Two animals were harmed making this post, well, just one, but I kicked it twice.
[omg, I will be SO modded down for this post, but damn, it is scary how easy it is to think like a loon.]
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
So the disadvantage of using low voltage DC is that the morons are more likely to be able to steal it, thus slowing down the removal of their genes from the population?