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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."
that always works
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.
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.
For instance, I suspect we waste more energy moving tap water in plastic bottles between cities.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Trollish troll, I rebuke thee with a Citationing of Statisticals:
Country / CO2 (ktonnes) / % of world emissions / source China (ex.Macau, Hong Kong) 7,031,916 23.5% UN Estimate[6] United States 5,461,014 18.27% UN Estimate[6]
Except that the population of China is 1.3 billion, and the population of the US is 315 million, so the statistics you supplied basically state that the US is polluting over 4 times as much per person than China is.
Good argument you have there.
Why is there so much China bashing in this thread? The GP didn't mention them at all, and as I mentioned in an earlier comment, they aren't relevant to the conversation.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
True. Those things are almost exact opposites. You will never waste money by cutting costs, if you are accounting correctly.
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
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
There's talk of removing a few Dams and with them the cheap power.
The Washington state Indians have a treaty to fish salmon they way they used to (with nets)
that they then sale to make a living. The salmon are in decline which is blamed in part to the Dams. All of
the Dams have fish ladders that help the Salmon migrate but they are asking for the lower (last) four Snake river Dams to be removed.
http://www.americanrivers.org/initiatives/dams/projects/snake-dam-removal-economics.html
It's much more than just the Indians, but they seem to be the loudest.
From the link: ...Replace the dams' energy in an affordable and carbon neutral manner..."
"Before the dams are removed, there must be a plan in place to:
I don't see how that can be accomplished unless wind power can be considered carbon neutral.
What have you and your countrymen done for the world? I'd seriously like to know what country you even come from. For all the stupid shit we americans do, have you ever looked at the amount of financial aid we give to countries that have absolutely no strategic value?
Yes, I have. It's embarrassingly low. A little less than what Greece gives, about half of what Germany gives, about 1/5th of what Sweden gives.
There's some stats over at http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-that-give-the-most-in-foreign-aid-statistics/
The US has a lot of good points. Foreign aid isn't one of them, and neither is consumption patterns.
(Oh, and I live in the US and am originally from Norway, if that makes a difference.)
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Neither does it care about international borders. The fact is that if people in China live their lives like people in the US then their pollution levels and energy spending would only be much, much higher. If you take countries instead of human beings as your base units this way, you would well come to the conclusion that the Chinese should starve because they eat more food than the Americans.
"From this financial quarter onwards, as part of our corporate strategy of reducing paper usage, all corporate division teams will be required to provide monthly publication quality reports detailing how much paper they have purchased, used and have saved in the past month. Duplicate copies should be printed out and sent to their line managers, accounting, purchasing, IT and archives. Each team should also maintain their own local archive to provide the annual report at the end of the financial year."
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads