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EPA Sends Data Center Power Study to Congress
BDPrime writes "We've all been hearing ad nauseum about power and cooling issues in the data center. Now the EPA has issued a final report to Congress detailing the problem and what might be done to fix it. Most likely what will happen is the EPA will add servers and data centers into its Energy Star program. If you don't feel like reading the entire 133-page report, the 14-page executive summary is a little easier to get through."
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
1.5% of the total electricity used in the US per year is a huge number. It's like when politicians talk about something really expensive and they say "oh, it's only 1% of our GDP" to make it sound not so bad, except to people who know just how enormous the GDP of this country is.
More importantly, this could probably be reduced considerably without major disruptions or reduction in quality of service by just embracing higher efficiency components in our datacenter equipment (especially servers).
I read the internet for the articles.
Which Madonna?
I've long been dumbfounded by the way datacenters charge. They seemingly all charge a hell of a lot for physical space, and then almost completely ignore power requirements. This seems incredibly strange, since datacenter operating costs are pretty much tied directly to power consumption (monthly electricity fees, UPSes, electrical generators, cooling, etc.), and only incidentally to physical space.
Further, the cost to handle each extra watt is multiplied thanks to cooling, power back-up, wiring, etc., while increasing the physical size of the building, constructing more datacenters, etc. is just a flat (linear) cost, and mostly just a one-time expenditure at that.
This strange arrangement is what has led us here. It's not the natural evolution of technology to cram as much power consumption into as tiny a box as possible. It's an artificial need, created by the idiotic distribution of fees common to datacenters.
If a few large datacenters declared their fees as a small $$$ value for each unit of space, and additionally a few dollars, per watt of power consumption, you'd see the problem naturally fix itself, through normal economic forces. As soon as watts are the defining factor, companies won't pay more for a cramped 1U server rather than an (inexpensive) 2U or 3U server. You will also see companies happy to pay more for lower-powered server hardware, as having them directly bear the energy cost will make buying efficient servers a significant savings to them.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No doubt our congress will act swiftly by moving daylight savings time to conserve power.
It's an estimated 11,000,000 servers in everything from 2 server closets to thousand server enterprise centers. These 11 million systems consume more power than all the TV sets in the US combined, and there are more TV sets in the US today than people.
Or lets do it this way. Hoover Dam at peak output produces 2 Gigawatts of power per hour. 11 million servers consume 61 billion KW hours annually. It takes Hoover Dam 30,000 hours (about 3.5 years) to produce that much power. So you need four Hoover Dams just to power all the data centers in the US.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Climate controlled. There's this element among building planners that think any outside air is bad(TM). That's why, even in small buildings where you don't have to worry about pressure differentials blowing windows out like you do in skyscrapers, you can't open a frick'n window in the Fall or Spring when the air smells wonderful and there's this perfect chill in the air the just stimulates the brain.
I'm drenched in sweat here in Hotlanta (it's 82F and 66% humidity and climbing to 94) and I really miss New England's Spring and Fall.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.