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By James Glanz, New York Times, September 22/23, 2012
The Cloud Factories: This is the first article in a series about the physical structures that make up the cloud, and their impact on our environment.
[....] A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.
Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show [....]
Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.
“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”
Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations [....]
Comments
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.
by artappraiser on Sun, 09/23/2012 - 1:39pm
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.
by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 09/23/2012 - 2:41pm
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.
by cmaukonen on Sun, 09/23/2012 - 7:05pm
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.
by EmmaZahn on Sun, 09/23/2012 - 8:36pm
Comment from PeraclesPlease, copied from another thread:
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 11:27pm
More from the series:
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 11:34pm