dagblog - Comments for "Power, Pollution and the Internet"

More from the series: Data

artappraiser — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 03:34:01 +0000

In reply to Power, Pollution and the Internet

More from the series:

Data Barns In Farm Town, Consuming Power, and Flexing Muscle
By JAMES GLANZ, New York Times, September 23/24, 2012

When Microsoft’s massive data center came to Quincy, Wash., the company’s sleek image gave way to hardball tactics reminiscent of an old-time manufacturer

[....] But for some in Quincy, the gee-whiz factor of such a prominent high-tech neighbor wore off quickly. First, a citizens group initiated a legal challenge over pollution from some of nearly 40 giant diesel generators that Microsoft’s facility — near an elementary school — is allowed to use for backup power.

Then came a showdown late last year between the utility and Microsoft, whose hardball tactics shocked some local officials.

In an attempt to erase a $210,000 penalty the utility said the company owed for overestimating its power use, Microsoft proceeded to simply waste millions of watts of electricity, records show. Then it threatened to continue burning power in what it acknowledged was an “unnecessarily wasteful” way until the fine was substantially cut, according to documents obtained by The New York Times [....]

Comment from PeraclesPlease,

artappraiser — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 03:27:51 +0000

In reply to Power, Pollution and the Internet

Comment from PeraclesPlease, copied from another thread:

Re: your data center energy post, I spent last few minutes reviewing technology updates, which include some great improvements in SSD storage (much more energy efficient than traditional hard drives, new upgrade kits for traditional PCs, plus much better performance starting up & running apps).

Also Dell put out new converged infrastructure blade server, comparing to HP:

- has 55 per cent fewer storage configuration steps
- supports 48 per cent more users
- supports 42 per cent more users per watt
- has up to 96 per cent more usable capacity.

In short, this kind of energy improvement is very much on everyone's minds. However, it needs to be built into the devices intuitively, as rearchitecting a data center with 100,000 servers is huge work

Microsoft has some good developments to allow easier cloud access for new version of Windows devices. (pushing its own cloud system of course.)

However, all of the big cloud providers have proved recently that the cloud is still fragile and subject to bad crashes. So they can't optimize as much yet as preferred simply because they need to keep some pretty non-optimal redundancy there that will probably take another 2-3 years to get rid of at least obvious stupid inefficiencies.

by PeraclesPlease 9/24/2012 - 9:03 am

reply

Pollyanna-ishly, I agree with

EmmaZahn — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:36:39 +0000

In reply to Power, Pollution and the Internet

Pollyanna-ishly, I agree with Peracles that technology advances will solve that part of the cloud problem and hopefully some of the greater energy storage problems at the same time.

I remember Google and Apple were building data centers in the Tennessee Valley in anticipation of the cloud's energy needs. Guess it is time to follow up on that.

After 30+ years in IT at a

cmaukonen — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 23:05:10 +0000

In reply to Power, Pollution and the Internet

After 30+ years in IT at a major university and can tell you this is but the tip of the situation. The article does not even go into the backup facilities that most major centers maintain off site that are powered up and running and ready to take over in the event of a major failure at the main site.

All this paranoia can be traced back to the days of mainframe computers that were notorious for not being able to be brought back up easily once powered down.

Sadly a bit of a scare-monger

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 18:41:08 +0000

In reply to Power, Pollution and the Internet

Sadly a bit of a scare-monger article.

New virtualization techniques to let more "computers" run on 1 machine.

Solid state disks that take up much less energy, and traditional disks that spin down.

Larger disk capacity meaning fewer needed. More efficient displays.

Energy efficient chips & rackmount servers, better power supplies....

Cloud and ISP data centers that are overall more efficient than individual company data centers, with increased tendency to outsource services (SaaS)

Companies like Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest re-designing their facilities around highly optimized energy-efficient solutions.

Much larger tape facilities to handle off-line storage.

I was just thinking, inspired

artappraiser — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 17:39:37 +0000

In reply to Power, Pollution and the Internet

I was just thinking, inspired by reading another thread here, that if we deleted all the blasphemy on the internet, we probably wouldn't have a problem, as then he who shall not be named would provide.