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."

Comments

Doesn't really matter

[Hentes]

These are just publicity stunts. Computing is cheap in terms of energy, the energy used by datacenters barely registers in the total energy usage.

Re:Doesn't really matter

[afidel]

Datacenters accounted for 1.3% of all electricity used worldwide in 2010, I imagine it's higher today, so reducing their power usage by say 40% is a big deal, almost as big as the similar reduction in the 5-6% of total electricity used for residential lighting we got by switching to LED/CFL.

Go North, Young Man

[habig]

Why don't they just site their centers up north? Here in Duluth, most of the year the outside air is cooled for free by mother nature. Heck, they could sell their waste heat to nearby homes and businesses and get a negative PUE.

Don't need to be green to worry about this, it's $$, something ever company wants.

Re:Go North, Young Man

[CastrTroy]

Well, it's in the middle of the US, so it will provide better latency to people in New York than having your servers located in San Francisco. It's also not far from some "large" cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis. Also for some things latency doesn't matter so much. Sure if you're gaming it makes some difference, but if you're streaming a movie from the datacenter, it doesn't matter if your ping time is 10 ms or 1000 ms, because the movie is going to buffer at least 2 or 3 seconds before you start to watch it anyway.

Re:Fuck those companies

[EvilSS]

Everyone does realize this was one of those "On a scale of 1 to 6, 6 being extremely important" type surveys, right? It was also among other categories (ranked for importance) like:

Up-front cost
Long-term cost / TCO
Speed of delivery
Reliability
Electrical/energy efficiency
Minimizing under-utilized assets / operating near full capacity

Re:Fuck those companies

[The Grim Reefer]

The total dollar amount given by the US is $28.67 billion That's more than number two and three (France and Germany) combined. If you factor in military and financial aid for 2011 was $49.5 billion. There's also an additional 10 to $30 billion donated by private non-government sources.