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Microsoft, Google Battle Over Energy Efficiency
1sockchuck writes "Microsoft and Google have opened a new front in their battle for global domination: data center energy efficiency. Just weeks after Google published data on the extreme efficiency of its previously secret data centers, Microsoft says it has achieved similar results with shipping containers (despite Google's patent) packed with up to 2,500 servers. The geeky benchmark for the battle is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a green data-center metric advanced by The Green Grid. Microsoft says its containers tested at a PUE of 1.22, while Google reported an average PUE of 1.21 for its data centers, which apparently are also now using containers."
If they care so much about being "green", are they using recycled containers ?
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OK so if you have a PUE of 1.2 then five-sixths of the input energy is used to power the computer equipment. But that doesn't say how energy efficient the machines themselves are. You could be running 150W Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors, or whatever, and still get a higher 'efficiency' than someone using Atom processors giving the same computational speed with lower power usage.
In the old days I would have suggested that Microsoft was limited to x86 processors and so they would necessarily have higher power usage than Google, who would be free to use more power-efficient architectures like ARM or PowerPC. But I get the feeling this isn't true nowadays. In servers and high-end desktops, do Intel x86 chips now offer the best bang per watt?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Given Live! search popularity, it is easy to be ahead of Google in this regard. They could as well turn the whole thing off and become rich.
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This is like two fat people drinking diet coke with their supersized double cheeseburger meal.
why stop at modular walls? what if they were to install the servers inside tubes, perhaps a series of them. a series of tubes that carries data... i'm off to the patent office!
PUE is a rubbish metric for this. The definition is nothing more than "power at utility meter" / "power used directly by IT kit". There's no account of WHAT that power is doing. Is it running one PC or a thousand? Is it hitting Gigaflops or nanoflops? You could put a laptop without a battery into a datacentre and get a PUE better than someone who has a thousand rackmounts all running at full speed. All PUE measures is the efficiency of the power conversion gear and associated equipment (e.g. UPS, etc.). In fact, UPS is an interesting measure too because the PUE of kit with a UPS would be greatly hindered in PUE stakes even against otherwise identical equipment.
Now, "Total Teraflops / Power at utility meter" - that's a more accurate metric to be comparing. And I'd guess that there Google's containers would wipe the floor with MS's (unless, of course, some trickery is being done in the TFlops measurement - you would have to carefully define what's needed). And even then, throwing a bucket load of low-power ARM processors running Linux into every square inch possible would probably thrash even Google in those stakes (unless they already do that?).
If you're going to have a contest over a metric, at least understand the metric and its shortcomings before you start claiming that X is better than Y.
Is there some unwritten rule that you can't use 'and' in a headline?
Since it is mostly irrelevant where a data center physically is
Actually I think latency is a major issue for both Microsoft and Google as they chase the market for online applications.
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The power usage during standby is only about 1-2 watts on a decent PC these days. The power usage during hibernation is also about 1-2 watts and the power usage while OFF is about 1-2 watts as well. So unless you are actually prepared to turn your PC off at the wall then they are right, standby mode is generally the best way of saving power because the speed to resume from standby means that you can put the PC into standyby mode much more often than you would turn it off and the PC can put itself into standyby mode automatically.