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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.
Considering that the processing power has more than doubled over that amount of time it would seem that we are still getting more bang per watt than before
Why does this alarm anyone and is it even really true? Several factors conspire to make this statistic both bogus and unalarming.
1. More computers are classed as "servers." I'd bet that before many of the workgroup and corporate IT computers and mainframes weren't classed as "servers." It's the trend toward hosted services, web farms, ASPs, etc. that is moving more computers from dispersed offices to concentrated server farms.
2. More of the economy runs on servers - this would be like issuing a report during the industrial revolution that power consumption by factories increased at an "alarming" rate. Moreover, I'd wager that a good chunk of that server power is paid for by exporting internet and IT-related services.
3. Electricity is only a small fraction of U.S. energy consumption. Most of the energy (about 2/3) goes into transportation (of atoms, not bits).
It's only natural and proper that server power consumption should rise with the increasing use of the internet in global commerce. This report should be cause for celebration, not cause for alarm. (but then celebration does sell news, does it.)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"If current trends continue" is almost always followed by a fallacious argument. Current trends rarely continue. Be it world population, transistor density, climatology, and especially at the blackjack table.
Just pointing that out.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"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
Get a grip on reality.
Even if you switch to 48V DC, you still have to convert 120 VAC to 48 V DC, then down to 12/5/3.3/1.x volts for motors and logic, so all you're doing is moving the conversion from a decentralized setup (a power supply in each computer) to a centralized one (a single large power supply). In the end, however, you still have to get from 120 down to around 1 volt for the CPU, and you're not going to suddenly make an order-of-magnitude change in the efficiency of that - or even near a doubling.
To keep it in perspective, though, there are vastly overshadowing losses which make the small differences in centralized/decentralized conversion efficiency moot. Your 120 VAC leg is probably coming from a 440 VAC lead coming into the building, and going through a very large transformer to get 120 VAC - and the 440 VAC that comes in is coming from a much higher voltage that was converted down at least once (and perhaps more) after being transmitted very long distances. The losses in all of that are much, much higher than the losses in conversion that you mention.
Sure, if you could generate and transmit a nice, smooth, regulated 48V DC from the power station to your computer, that would be great - but that's so unfeasable that you might as well wish for a pink unicorn while you're at it.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.