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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 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"
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No, you're completely wrong because the analogy doesn't work. Browsers need to support specific codecs for so that video encoders know how to encode video. Videos take up lots of space and require lots of CPU cycles to encode. If I know all of my clients support H.264 then I can encode video once and have it only take up space once on my server's hard drive. I shouldn't have to create and store H.264, Ogg Theora, MPEG2, and MJPEG versions just because every different browser chose their own format to support.
This is the same reason that browsers need to support specific image file formats. I remember when not all browsers supported JPEG (GIF and XBM were the only image formats most browsers supported), so web sites needed to have GIF fallback images. Some browsers partially supported JPEGs and opened them with a separate graphic viewer in another window. Of course there's nothing that says your browser can't support TIFF and BMP, but it damn well better support GIF, PNG, and JPEG.
But saying that you must use economizers isn't like saying you must use H.264; it's like saying that you must use SSE2 CPU instructions to decode H.264 streams. What if newer SSE4 instructions make it go faster? What if you don't even have an x86 chip in your device? Who cares how you decode the stream as long as you can make it show up without skipping frames?
So Urs was right, you were wrong.
dom
...Google just wants to continue using the chilled blood of babies to cool their data centers.
First, name something that isn't a limited resource.
Human stupidity.