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Data Centers Push Back On US Efficiency Rules
alphadogg writes "Data center executives from Google and other large companies are pushing back against new efficiency requirements proposed by a prominent standards group, saying they are too 'prescriptive' and don't leave them room to innovate. 'This standard defines the energy efficiency for most types of buildings in America and is often incorporated into building codes across the country,' Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president for operations, wrote in a post on the Google blog. Data centers are among the fastest-growing users of energy, and setting efficiency standards for them is a welcome step, he said. But he called the requirements 'too prescriptive.' Instead of setting efficiency targets and letting engineers decide how they can best meet them, the amendments specify types of cooling systems that companies should use."
I made the argument a couple days ago that video codecs should not be directly supported in browsers. The market must be able to innovate, and by forcing specific technologies, the playing field is narrowed and users are ultimately hurt by such prescriptive actions.
I'm in full agreement with Mr. Hoelzle, and I think that anyone who truly believes in limited government would as well.
So they can pull out a law forcing data centers to use the latest iCooling device from brand XYZ.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
That doesn't work for limited resources. Though applied to energy now, the right of government to impose quotas has been recognized for decades in fishing and hunting.
On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense. It shouldn't matter much how they manage to accomplish this as long as they manage to do so. On the other hand, there are problems with that approach: 1) One might want to specifically not encourage certain approaches if they had other negative results (we'd certainly feel that way about a process that improves building insulation using the flesh of newborn babies). 2) It may be difficult to measure efficiency and other metrics directly. So having specific requirements helps remove that uncertainty. This is one reason why a lot of building codes are so specific. The way the electric wiring needs to go in residential homes is standardized. Sure, you might come up with a better way of doing it. But the probability is high that something will go drastically wrong.
Everyone has a PUE? It's a rating by which you determine your efficiency.
I was talking with one engineer who had designed some interesting storage units. He was like yeah, in theory, it has a PUE of 1. Uhhh... you mean no cooling costs? He said, "Precisely."
It actually uses a very novel method of cooling, but they never went into production to my knowledge.
This is precisely what they were referring to in terms of too prescriptive in requirements. Through some innovation in varying scales you can produce some systems which perform far superior to TODAY'S conventional technologies.
Also note, in some of the larger shops they engineer some of their own devices. This may or may not fall into the confines of what is described in a mandate. Gasp! I know, more strange innovation. However, this is an area where many individuals and corporations have been trying to be king of efficiency for years.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I don't know about you, but I've become somewhat jaded when it comes to standards like these. Usually, there's one or more parties who stand to gain financially if the standards are implemented (naturally). But when those who benefit are those that impose the standards themselves, doesn't it become somewhat of a slippery slope?
Where I work, there was this company XXX who was touting some kind of solution to protect mobile phone users; if your phone is stolen, and you report it to the operator, there was some mechanism in place that would lock the phone when it was powered up. This could be done because each phone has a unique identifier, kind of like a MAC address. Problem was, the technical platform was supposedly half-baked and too pricey, so many of the operators rejected it. But then, they got the idea to approach the government - and lo and behold, the powers-that-be came up with some regulation and standards that all operators had to comply to. Best of all -- we had to use Company XXX's technology!
So the question is -- do the members (or more likely, ASHRAE's Technical Committee members) stand to gain financially by implementing this? I would think so, since ASHRAE's made up of persons in the HVAC and other related fields. Members will gain access to "many opportunities to participate in the development of that technology"
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
the exception is here, it's the large companies that are paying, and there's a difference in-between $40petrol a week and a 4 million dollar power bill.
if you want to reference it to cars - putting laws on the petrol use of cars would be like putting laws on how much power an individual computer is use - it's still apples and oranges
They have a rather large incentive to get their power bills down, and it's one of the area's where putting people working on it full will still provide a profit, and positive pr for them as well - win-win, telling people to use X or Y methods, and not try anything else is not only counter productive, but will also cost us in the long run, what new methods are going to miss out on in 5-10-15 years because people weren't allowed to try.
...Google just wants to continue using the chilled blood of babies to cool their data centers.
The car analogy is relevant to a point.
However, computers and data centers are not cars. Technologies that artificially restrict things may be very harmful in the long run. For example, virtualization. Each physical machine is using more energy because of the added load of VMs, but because one physical box has replaced 1+ hardware machines with a VM, this means that a machine that is consuming 1000 watts of electricity is better than two running at 750. If someone places some arbitrary requirement that machines cannot use over 800 watts, then a server room will be forced to get more machines of a lesser wattage.
Or perhaps take SAN storage. As hard disks get denser and denser, they tend to put out more heat and use more energy. However, (and this is not factoring in RAID or other reasons to use multiple disks), the increased capacities more than make up for the increased heat. So, a 2TB drive may store more, but it replaces a number of smaller capacity drives that might use less energy singly, but combined, use more than the one drive. (Of course to reiterate, this is an example that factors out needs for multiple drives such as striping, redundancy and other stuff.)
Ultimately, energy efficiency is needed, but people can't just say that a 1U system can only take "X" amount of watts, similar to how cars are specced with MPG.
What might help efficiency are asymmetrical cores. If a database server is used 9-5, it could have a couple Intel Atom spec CPUs on it, as well as a number of normal CPUs. This way, when the CPU usage is so low that the low power Atom cores can completely deal with the machine's overhead, the other cores can be shut down when everyone heads out for Miller time.
Monopolies unfairly remove competition in the absence of government regulation.
Being green is good except for whenever **I** have to do it!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
First, name something that isn't a limited resource. Here's a hint: there is not such thing. Given that fact and your reasoning above I must conclude that you support government-imposed quotas on all resources.
Second, why are quotas the only reasonable way to control usage? The parent clearly allowed for governmental intervention to adjust the price of resources to reflect costs not otherwise represented in the traditional market value of those resources. Couldn't that system work to achieve the same goals without the inflexibility of quotas?
The same thing was done in the past. Only 6 inch round headlamps was allowed in cars manufactured and sold in America. It was the best back then, but what happen in the following years is that it stop innovation all together in America and Europe started to make better headlamps. Years ago was the law was repealed and non 6 inch headlamps was allowed to be installed on autos. Took years for America to catch up.
First, name something that isn't a limited resource.
Human stupidity.
cartels often use the power of government regulation to do the work for them. A cartel is very different from a monopoly and benefit from the distinction. They have influence above a monopoly precisely because there exists a few in cooperative competition. In the US you have cartels in cars, telecom, media, and pretty much every other totally screwed up market segment. All of them use the power of government to screw consumers and restrict competition.
First, name something that isn't a limited resource.
Sunlight. At least it isn't a limited resource with regard to the human specie's lifetime. That's right, I'm favoring the extinction of humans prior to the the earth being engulfed by the sun as it turns into a red giant in 4 billion years.
the invisible hand of the market: SURE !
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
sunlight is certainly a limited resource. measuring over the life of the sun is meaningless if the people doing the measurement won't exist that long. Rather measure the amount of sunlight captured per square meter by say a solar panel or a tree and you will certainly find a limit. even measure all of the sunlight falling on earth during a day, huge for sure, but certainly finite in a reasonable sense.
Morpheus, God of Dreams.
The political system needs to milk the new economy and "Al Gore" like traders have positioned themselves.
You get some magical scale of CO2 per year based on some hidden, floating 'average' of your peers.
Beyond that you are made an "Offer You Can't Refuse".
Try and ride it out, you will feel the full force of the new EPA and have a eco rent a mob at your HQ.
The flip side to this? Is the US server industry riding 'rust belt' server tech for every last cycle they can?
Does better cooling tech exist on the open market thats not been used as its "not made here"?
Does the US gov know some hidden math about the grid that shows brown outs are on the way and a "green" upgrade cover is the only way to fix things before public reality catches up with the whispers of engineers?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
sunlight is limited you simpleton. you can't make the sun shine more can you?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It is one thing for the gov to say that we need to get our efficiencies up, for national interest. I have ZERO issues with that. The problem is that generally some lobbyists has gotten in there and made it now point to THEIR solution. Sadly, just about every one of those 'solutions' in any gov. response, will cost more and hurt us in the long run.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
These economizers that are being referenced are not always usable. They effectively circulate outside air into the data center. When the outside air is too hot, they can't be used. Also, when the outside air has too many pollutants, they can't be used. The cost of having them makes little sense when their usability is low. Other systems could make better use of the investment.
This is definitely a case where goals, not methods, should be prescribed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Google has it easy Towns bend over backwards to get them to build and locate within their locality. With that being said the tax payers are often stiffed with the "perks" and "Abatement's" that are guaranteed to Google and one of them is usually always the huge cost of power utility and infrastructure that Google doesn't necessarily absorb. With that said, Google should be responsive to the local government and regulatory committees and not be so defensive to them. Its ok to say "bad idea", its okay to say "This can hurt our engineering" but remember Google, you're plugged into a utility grid that the "people" put there for you so if you want to be the biggest consumer thereof, you have to play within the "commission" of those people.
Yes google, I admire you, but I admire you for what you can do and have done. Becoming more of a "black box" that gets its own way isn't what I hope to see. If the regulation/law/policy is bad, speak to it directly, not in vague assertations. Show the world your engineering ability and how to do it right if you feel you have that technology.
So... what hardware would they run on then? VMs hosting VMs hosting VMs hosting VMs?
greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
We did in Europe, which followed the suggestion that the grandparent made: adding taxes to cover externalities. Fuel taxes on this side of the pond mean that petrol is 2-4 times as expensive as in the USA (depending on the country), and so there is a strong incentive for consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars. A similar efficiency saving will save the customer significantly more over the lifetime of the vehicle in Europe than in the USA so there's more market pressure to provide efficient cars.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not to sound like a broken record, but: Corporations and free markets are mutually exclusive. Simply the existence of a corporation (which is a government endorsed entity) is a hindrance against the free market.
Thought experiment about cars: if the goal is increased mileage, which would be more effective back in the 1970s:
(a) Federal government sets fleet efficiency standards for manufacturers to meet & defines a standard measuring process
(b) Federal government mandates all new cars have 1-barrel carburetors
By the way, at least here in Finland high taxes were not originally added to fuel (and new cars) because of covering externalities, but to control trade balance. All fuel and cars were imported, and there was a fear that trade deficit would follow unless imports were not kept low by keeping the prices artificially high to consumers.
Of course after having high taxes on fuel they cannot be easily decreased, because then the government would have to raise other taxes or reduce spending... But it is nice that there is now another reason to keep fuel taxes high.
In the US you have cartels in cars
Huh? The US has one of the most competitive automobile markets in the world. Are you trying to imply that the Big Three are your only choice for purchasing an automobile?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
First, name something that isn't a limited resource.
Seawater.
You measure it with PUE. Google has zero incentive to drive towards an inefficient solution, they just want to be free to come up with newer, better solutions to obtain efficiency.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Forgive my ignorance but isn't the governments recognition of a corporation irrelevant? A freemarket can have corporations.. you would just call it an "organization", "family business", or "group working together". But it would be the exact same thing.. with or without government recognition and labeling.
It seems to me that the creation of the corporate entity is a good thing because as people come and go the company still has to maintain it's records and pay taxes. I can't imagine a non-corporate (or oganization) entity building anything complex that takes years.. Ship building, space travel, high-rise construction. They all require a large workforce, a middle management, and an upper management.. and tons of records to manage and keep.
I am open to other ideas, but cannot see how corporations can hinder a free market?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Virtualized storage? why?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
It is rules like those currently proposed that led us to exclusive use of asbestos in many applications such as all of our schools. Because instead of specifying the desired ourcome, they specified the materials to use. The rules should state the end objectives and not the details of how those objectives should be met.
The building codes are necessarily formulaic in that a high-school graduate building inspector in a small town needs to be able to evaluate if a given structure is being correctly constructed. So I am fine with examples of approaches that provide satisfactory results being included in the building codes. I just think it is a bad idea that the codes be written such that this is the only way that this can be acheived. If a company hires architects and experts or wants to apply a new technique developed at a university there should be room for this. Most municipalities or states simply take these codes and make them the law, so it can be next to impossible to work around short comings once they are made laws unless they are propperly written in the first place.
sunlight is certainly a limited resource. measuring over the life of the sun is meaningless if the people doing the measurement won't exist that long. Rather measure the amount of sunlight captured per square meter by say a solar panel or a tree and you will certainly find a limit. even measure all of the sunlight falling on earth during a day, huge for sure, but certainly finite in a reasonable sense.
But sunlight is infinite in the "renewable" sense: There will not come a day when you have used up all the sunlight. There is a point where you've cut down all the trees or mined out all the ore. Not with sunlight, that never ends (Ragnarok aside).
Now if you want to be reasonable, you'll have to agree to discuss the same definition of "finite", because there certainly is a limit to the amount of sunlight you can measure in a day or a space, but there is no end to the measurements themselves, you can keep making them forever.
You can't take the sky from me...
Everything is limited, but the actual limits are so large as to be practically non-existent. Of course in pragmatic terms, the vast majority of everything is well out of our reach, but it does exist.
This reply has no real purpose to the conversation, by the way, so don't bother rebutting me. I am, after all, technically correct.
Now, the tricky bit is defining what the metrics should be
And there is the rub, what happens when a new innovation makes the metrics being used obsolete? This regulation is really unnecessary. One of the largest costs of a data center will be its power consumption, any company that wants to remain competitive over the long run will build its data center as energy efficient as is cost effective. The effect of such regulations will be to cause companies that would otherwise build datacenters to continue to manage their data in a distributed fashion because the cost of building the datacenter exceeds the value of centralizing the data.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The primary complaint against corporations is the privilege of limited liability for torts. Limited liability for debts is something that could exist in a free market; that would be a private matter between the members of an organization and their creditors. Limited liability for torts, however, is something that cannot exist in a free market. Those injured by actions taken on behalf of any organization have the right to seek compensation from the individuals responsible, not just the organization they were working for. In essence, in a free market tort claims must always "piece the corporate veil."
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
But he called the requirements 'too prescriptive.' Instead of setting efficiency targets and letting engineers decide how they can best meet them, the amendments specify types of cooling systems that companies should use."
This makes perfect sense if:
* the government is fucking stupid
* the government wants to control you
Because if the legislation merely specified the end state (X reduction in Y), then more and smarter people would be able to find granular and custom solutions, it would be in their best interest to do so. But instead, it's idiot diktat from above, with no consideration of X-order consequences, and you get that either by stupid hubristic ego or by a desire to extend power and control. I actually lean towards the former, as most pols are lawyers and the lawyers that had any brains get paid more than pols.
BTW, same thing with stupid CAFE mandates. If you want to reduce CO2/smog/imported oil/etc, just jack up the gasoline tax $5-6/gal. That allows folks the freedom to adapt in the way most amenable to their individual needs: less driving for families who need 8mpg monstrosities, higher mileage cars for those who can buy them, mass transit or trip rationalization for those who can't.
That makes perfect sense to me. I've been running scenerios in my mind and as long as an individual(s) led the corporation to do harm, it's a good thing. I can see ambiguous situations though where many people are collectively guilty through a chain of events that led unknowingly to harm. In that situation the collective/corporation is to blame for the damage and not the individuals. But maybe not, i don't know.. maybe it always points to an individual. Does intent to harm matter at all?
Does the free market encompass marketplace wrongdoing? The free market shouldn't have anything to do with laws.. but i can see how government laws could interfere with the market. If people were responsible for the actions of their company we would have a lot more whistleblowers to dangers i think.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
s/word/word
Is that a RegEx or something like that? Like
$foo = "driven";
$bar = RegEx("s/driven/tempered/");
Printf($bar);
Is my pseudocode gonna print "tempered"?
:P
Totally offtopic, but I'm curious cause I see it in IRC all the time and I asked once but I don't think anyone was listening
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Rule 13545 of efficiency standards for cooling systems:
"You will think what you want before opening fridge's door".
informative
I can see ambiguous situations though where many people are collectively guilty through a chain of events that led unknowingly to harm. In that situation the collective/corporation is to blame for the damage and not the individuals.
I agree that such situations may exist. Unforeseeable and accidental harm is a tricky subject. However, this applies equally well to issues of diffuse responsibility outside of any formal organization, so I don't see it as a particular problem of corporations. The existence of a formal organization may make it easier to define the group responsible, but then again it may simply be misleading: there could be members who did not contribute to the harm, or there could be others outside the organization who did contribute.
Does intent to harm matter at all?
When harm is done, there are two kinds of consequences to consider: restitution and retribution.
Restitution applies regardless of intent; even in the case of purest accident, if you harm someone you must "make them whole". In my opinion, if one refuses to make full restitution then the remaining harm should be considered deliberate, regardless of any previous intent.
Retribution only applies in cases of deliberate harm, and is based on the principle of estoppel: if one person harms another deliberately and without proportional provocation then their actions speak for themselves, preventing them from arguing that this harm was right then but wrong now. If what they did is right—according to them, since this is properly a subjective matterthen doing the same to them in punishment must also be right; if they instead argue that what they did is wrong then they admit that they deserve punishment. If they attack universality by arguing that right and wrong differ from person to person, or place to place, or time to time, then their opponent can make an identical argument to justify their punishment. In short, once cannot claim protection from a particular action after denying said protection to others. (See Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach by N. Stephen Kinsella for a more complete treatment of this position.)
All of this hinges on the presence of intent, however: one cannot justify a deliberate response to accidental harm on the basis that the response is equivalent to the original act, as the circumstances differ. Provided restitution is made, unintentional harm does not invite retribution.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Thanks for the explaination. It makes me laugh a little to think about spreading the restitution/retribution across the company or several people in it anyways.
I'm picturing a 100k$ fine that must be paid from employee pockets based on a breakdown of wage divided by total profit over a fixed period (like 1 year or so). Wage should also include all bonuses and cash values of benefits and perks (like shares, vacation, personal jet). The finacial burden would be very top heavy in most of today's big business. Jail time could also land management in timeout for long periods of time. Unless the payscale was evened out a little.
cost per employee = Fine*(wage/profit)
A fast food employee would have to pay around $250 for a 100k$ fine.. assuming they make above minimum wage and the store is making ~3k$/h. That would actually hurt a lot.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Trouble is, especially in today's HEAVILY litigious society, that if this protection wasn't there, you would absolutely KILL small businesses in the US. And the small business far outnumbers the large corporations...and employ the majority of people in the US.
If you make a 1-2 or so person company liable for everything they own in case something goes wrong, etc....no one would be willing to take the risk of starting a small business. They MUST have the protections of this.
Not to mention, it is about the only way a person in the US can really keep as much of their money as possible from the taxman as possible...by being able to write off expenses, etc.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If I recall correctly isn't Google using solar power for several of its data centers? If this is the case who cares how much power those data centers are using if they are self sustainable. There were several comments made by a few companies on this issue in the posted article all of which were interesting. I think I would much rather have Google or other companies like Google spend resources on finding a better more energy efficient way of doing things rather than be forced to just use what's mandated.