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Data Center Managers Weary of Whittling Cooling Costs
Nerval's Lobster writes that a survey from the Uptime Institute "suggests something it calls 'green fatigue' is setting in when it comes to making data centers greener. 'Green fatigue' is exactly as it sounds: managers are getting tired of the increasingly difficult race to chop their PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness. The PUE is a measure of a data center's efficiency. The lower the PUE, the better — and Microsoft and Google, with nearly limitless resources, have set the bar so high (or low, depending on your perspective) that it's making less-capitalized firms frustrated. Just a few years ago, the Uptime Institute estimated that the average PUE of a data center was around 2.4, which meant for every dollar of electricity to power a data center, $1.4 dollars were spent to cool it. That dropped to 1.8 recently, an improvement to be sure. But then you have companies such as Google and Microsoft building data centers next to rivers for cheap hydroelectric power in remote parts of the Pacific Northwest and reporting insanely low PUEs (below 1.1 in some cases). The Institute latest survey of data center operators shows only 50 percent of respondents in North America said they considered energy efficiency to be very important to their companies, down from 52 percent last year and 58 percent in 2011."
I like the way Facebook say they don't use HVAC... yet their entire BUILDING is a huge HVAC unit!
Efficiency of scale works nicely with HVAC, if you can afford to get the building made to your specs.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
For instance, I suspect we waste more energy moving tap water in plastic bottles between cities.
Actually, electricity is one of the major costs of running a large data center - the amortized cost of a single server is probably only a few hundred bucks a year over its lifetime. The energy to operate it is typically a comparable amount, and the energy for cooling is even greater.
Now I wouldn't expect anyone to upgrade their cooling efficiency on a regular basis, but it's foolish not to consider both operating and cooling efficiency during a major upgrade - you may end up paying a larger sticker price, but it can lower your amortized costs significantly.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In 2009 the EPA estimated that if historical trends for datacentre expansion continue (that is PUE remains steady as datacentres continue to be built) then USA datacentre power usage would consume 120 billion kWh/year. To put that into perspective a typical house uses about 12000 kWh/year. So datacentre usage was projected to be the equivalent of 10 million US households. Best case scenario currently puts this closer to 5 million US households.
That's just serving up data. Now add the insane amounts of network switching gear to allow data to get to the end users and then add the computing power of the end users themselves and you end up with a significant environmental footprint.
All this based just on environmental savings too. Don't forget energy costs money so by improving cooling efficiency there's significant opportunity for high ROI in the long run. Being energy inefficient these days is an express ticket to Chapter 11, especially for companies like Facebook and Twitter who had trouble monetising their services to being with. Many of these companies have a really large book value but very poor cashflows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
Riiiiight.