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
?This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to?say mea culpa,?
?We?re what?s causing the problem.?
THE CLOUD FACTORIES. NYT, By JAMES GLANZ??September 22, 2012?Power, Pollution and the Internet ??? Today, the information?generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of?these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers?spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with?industrial cooling systems.
They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that?now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information.?Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an?innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit?card balances through Visa?s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files?attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers?online.
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. Online
companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around
the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90
percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times
found.
To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of
generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers
has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air
regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers
appear on the state government?s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a
roster of the area?s top stationary diesel polluters.
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.
A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and
keyboard, that contains chips to process data. The study sampled about
20,000 servers in about 70 large data centers spanning the commercial
gamut: drug companies, military contractors, banks, media companies
and government agencies.
?This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to
say mea culpa,? said a senior industry executive who asked not to be
identified to protect his company?s reputation. ?If we were a
manufacturing industry, we?d be out of business straightaway.?
These physical realities of data are far from the mythology of the
Internet: where lives are lived in the ?virtual? world and all manner
of memory is stored in ?the cloud.?
The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic
relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the
click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they
fail to meet that expectation.
Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to
satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data
centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of
lead-acid batteries ? many of them similar to automobile batteries ?
to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few
hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers.
?It?s a waste,? said Dennis P. Symanski, a senior researcher at the
Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry group. ?It?s
too many insurance policies.???
That secrecy often extends to energy use. To further complicate any
assessment, no single government agency has the authority to track the
industry. In fact, the federal government was unable to determine how
much energy its own data centers consume, according to officials
involved in a survey completed last year.
The survey did discover that the number of federal data centers grew
from 432 in 1998 to 2,094 in 2010??.
?People keep old e-mails and attachments forever, so you need a lot
of space.????.
With no sense that data is physical or that storing it uses up space
and energy, those consumers have developed the habit of sending huge
data files back and forth, like videos and mass e-mails with photo
attachments. ?..
To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three
million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to
figures from the International Data Corporation.
Nationwide, data centers used about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010,
or roughly 2 percent of all electricity used in the country that year,
?
Whatever happens within the companies, it is clear that among
consumers, what are now settled expectations largely drive the need
for such a formidable infrastructure.
?That?s what?s driving that massive growth ? the end-user expectation
of anything, anytime, anywhere,? said David Cappuccio, a managing vice
president and chief of research at Gartner, the technology research
firm. ?We?re what?s causing the problem.?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&smid=fb-share&adxnnlx=1353701278-5khzBfD1IuomtDmR0zZoDw
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