Slashdot Mirror
Google's Addiction to Cheap Electricity
Googling Yourself writes "Harpers magazine has published a blueprint of Google's new data center at The Dalles, Oregon where they will be tapping into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. Although the plans show three 68,680-square-foot storage buildings, only two of the buildings have been constructed so far. Based on a projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot, the Dalles plant can be expected to use 103 megawatts of electricity. Google's server farm represents a new phase in the transformation of the Columbia River over the past half-century. Across the street from the Google data center is an example the last generation of high energy consumers; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com are also planning data centers on the Columbia River."
Site for massive technology company has high power requirements? well of course.
Companies prefer low costs to high costs? k, right on.
This story brought to you by The Dalles, Oregon Chamber of Commerce.
Of course companies that have large compute clusters are migrating to areas that offer steady low cost power and cooling. It is simple business. Power and Cooling account for the majority of the expense of running a DataCenter. The draw is a lot of extremely cheap electricity combined with cold outside air (allowing bypass cooling) is something that is to important to pass up if you have thousands of servers.
One other thing to keep in mind is that in many places the power infrastructure is strained to its limit. For example I heard that to get 1 megawatt of power in downtown San Francisco it will take upwards of Three years for PG&E to deliver. Putting DataCenters in locations that aren't constrained is just good business sense.
Colin McNamara - CCIE #18233 "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer"
Their own search engine has popularized Richard C. Duncan's Olduvai Theory (.pdf) which now has empirical support.
They have the mobile google-boxes all over the place, but there are still a number of purposes for a static, secure, and reliable data center. I think a combination of the two makes the most effective system. High speed coupled with high reliability, with everything able to reroute in real time.
It disappoints me that a three-word smartass comment gets modded up, even when it misses the point.
TFA addresses much larger issues than shopping for cheap electricity. It's about how the Internet companies require vastly more energy to run than most people realize, and how taxpayers are footing the bill for a lot of it.
My thought exactly. Since she clearly thinks that Google needs to reduce its energy usage, perhaps she can suggest a way to do so? The really ironic part of the article was when she criticized Google for offsetting their energy use by generating green energy. Apparently the fact that Google's competitors might not do the same somehow reflects badly on Google. I don't quite get it...
I wonder how high Google's energy use REALLY is? Two big factors:
1) The 108MW figure assumes 500 watts per square foot, simply because that is industry standard. I just don't think Google is industry standard 8-). They wouldn't necessarily even have x86-compatible systems if something else has better performance/watt (although I suspect they do use x86 still.) Since they cluster they don't have to buy anything even very high performance as opposed to low-power -- especially if it turns out usual uses are more I/O bound than CPU-bound. This would imply lower watts/square foot. On the other hand, maybe they get boxes that pack even more CPUs than normal into a square foot (more watts/square foot.)
2) "Thinking outside the box". Google has for instance put solar panels up on one office complex they have, which generates 30% of the power it uses. Not saying they'll shave 30% off the power use in a data center (since they use more power than offices) but I suspect they have the "big brains" at Google doing R&D on any ways to cut unneeded power use, much more than at other companies where.. well, hell, in some cases they outsource the whole data center to a third party.
Is as hypocritical as they come... They locate in Oregon touting "clean" energy provided by hydroelectric power - never mind the salmon kills.
Nonetheless... can you imagine the uproar among their fan base if they would have relocated to the Ohio Valley where cheap - coal fired electricity exists and a region that desperately needs the jobs.
Because transporting information is a hell of a lot cheaper than transporting electricity.
The only product Google sells is digital information. Transporting data is dirt cheap. So Google could care less where the data is, as long as they can access it quickly.
Transporting electricity requires big cables made of very expensive metals. Power transmission systems are massive and require a lot of maintenance. They are affected by wind, ice, and lightening. The amount of power Google uses is not at all trivial to have run into urban or suburban areas. Worse yet, when electricity is transmitted, a lot of it leaks out along the way.
Compared to electricity, transporting information is dirt cheap. Data can be transported by much less expensive and much smaller fiber optic cables. Fiber optics require a lot less maintenance than power lines. Lightening strikes, ice, and high winds don't usually have any impact on fiber backbones. Better still, comparatively tiny amounts of electricity are needed to maintain data integrity over long distances. And unlike power transmission, the valuable stuff being transmitted doesn't leak out along the way.
All Google cares about is getting the information back and forth between its users. So it really doesn't matter where the data center is. Electricity is even cheaper at places like Canada's James Bay project. I suspect the only reason Google doesn't go to places like that is the difficulty in getting quality staff to work so far north and so far from "civilization".
This line of reasoning always confuses me. How is giving someone a tax break the same as giving them a subsidy? You imply that businesses in some way pay taxes. I know the tax rate on corporate profits is 35% in most places, but the reality is that these costs are simply passed on to consumers. It's the consumers who really pay the tax.
We should outlaw corporate taxes entirely, since all they do is hide the tax from the people who really pay it.
it just runs the dehumidifier to lower the relative humidity of the incoming cold air (Chicago suburbs).
You are removing the humidity from cold outside air and *then* that air is heated to room temperature (which lowers the relative humidity even more) by the heat coming from the servers. What is the humidity in your datacenter, 10%?