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Most big data centers, the global backbone of the Internet, could slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 88 percent by switching to efficient, off-the-shelf equipment and improving energy management, according to new research.
Eric Masanet, Arman Shehabi, Jonathan Koomey. Characteristics of low-carbon data centres. Nature Climate Change, 2013; 3 (7): 627 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1786
LOL, I love this quote and it couldn't be more true:
Quote:
"Who designs and builds your cable box? The cable company. Who pays the electric bill? You do," said Koomey. "So, you end up with a cat warmer on your shelf."
I'm gonna puke if I see another article in this forum that has:
<blah><blah><blah> Experts say...
They are wrong more than they are right....
For example, anyone else remember the "Experts" saying we would run out of IPV4 addresses over 10 years ago?
So lets scrap a few trillion dollars worth of Internet gear because a few "Experts" think it will cut greenhouse gas emissions... Will that stop climate change? Who knows but the world has tons of spare change every time an "Expert" says......
Another example of the "Experts"....
A few decades ago the "Experts" said Freon was killing off trees on the tops of mountains...
So the industry changed to a different type of Freon, as of today the trees on the mountaintops are still dying....
July 19, 2013 — The U.S. Department of Energy has announced that it wants to establish minimum energy efficiency standards for all computers and servers sold in the United States.....
That's where I stopped reading. Don't want no damned gubmint establishing standards. Things are bad enough already.
Doubtful they can implement any standard that includes them forcing companies to swap out all their old stuff for new stuff, just like it'a doubtful they can make anyone throw out their old microwave from 1989 in favor of a newer and more efficient one. As things break or wear out, they'll eventually be replaced by a newer model. Those newer models will be more efficient by design and by standard. I don't think implementing standards on efficiency will hurt the effectiveness or durability of a data center.
They can slash their carbon emissions by 100% by simply moving to eastern Washington.
BMW moved their carbon fiber plant to Moses Lake for this reason.
High speed fiber access for over a decade to the home and business. Lowest electricity prices in the United States and carbon-free to boot. Great climate for people and server farms.
As someone who spends a lot of time in datacenters, there are a lot of problems with these energy efficiency stories. The single biggest problem is that paying customers -- the people who pay my salary -- don't want it. I didn't read this particular story, but I can guess it's about the same as all the others: much of the data loss comes from servers sitting idle and inefficient power distribution.
That is 100%, absolutely, positively true and correct. There IS a MASSIVE amount of power spent just keeping powerful servers sitting idly by in the hopes that they will be needed a few nanoseconds from now. Take a single rack of high-density medium-performance dual-CPU servers, and you're easily looking at over 12 KW per rack without even trying. Multiply that by hundreds of racks for a small datacenter, and tens of thousands of racks for a large one. And they spend the vast majority of their time doing absolutely nothing but waiting. Then there's the power loss: AC current to the racks gets converted into DC current in each individual power supply, which generates a lot of heat loss. That's bad enough on its own, but the the datacenter uses massive cooling loops to take that heat back out of the environment -- there's even more money being spent on energy costs.
It's a lot like pointing a space heater and an air conditioner at each other, then turning them both on. I am not even exaggerating here - that is almost exactly what happens.
So why doesn't anything change? There have been significant improvements to efficiency over the years, to be sure. And processing power per watt is becoming a bigger concern these days. But we're talking about baby steps. Why hasn't anything major happened? Why aren't we using more power-efficient processors and power supplies? Why don't we use more energy-efficient cooling systems? Why don't we spin down some of those servers if they're rarely used?
The simple answer is because customers don't want it. You already hate it when a web page takes an extra half second to load. Now imagine if every page on the Internet suddenly took an extra two or three seconds to load because datacenters dropped their heavy-duty Xeon processors in favor of energy-efficient Atom processors. And imagine if every website on the Internet regularly suffered downtime of several days or more because datacenters stopped allowing RAID arrays and SANs, and required each server to use a single hard drive. And imagine if websites were more prone to errors because datacenters stopped using processors that support ECC memory. What if it took you 20 or 30 tries to successfully load just one page of City-Data? Would you come back? Would you even keep trying after the second or third attempt?
There's the problem: Making the Internet reliable takes energy.
Now, there IS a pretty decent solution that's gaining more ground by the day. Virtualization is the act of taking a single powerful server and carving it up into a number of smaller, slightly less powerful servers. Instead of one server handling one client, a server can suddenly handle multiple clients at the same time. Each client will see a very slight reduction in processing power, but the datacenter will see a MASSIVE drop in energy consumption. Instead of having 25 physical servers to run 25 different clients, you can have one server to handle all 25 clients, a second server to act as a backup, and a third server to act as a tertiary backup.
Now apply that on a datacenter scale. Instead of powering (and cooling) 70,000 physical servers, you can power (and cool) 3000-7000 physical servers, and your clients get more or less the same amount of power. Even better, those clients pay less for their virtual server than they do for their dedicated server. Instead of forking over $200 / month for their server, now they're only forking over $50 - $100 / month.
The customer wins because they pay less per month. The datacenter wins because they're paying to run fewer servers. The environment wins because emissions are reduced. Everybody's happy.
I'm greatly simplifying things here, of course. Some applications don't take well to virtualization, and some data is too sensitive to put "in the cloud". But the fundamentals are dead on.
Last edited by DowntownHarrisburg; 08-13-2013 at 07:02 PM..
For example, anyone else remember the "Experts" saying we would run out of IPV4 addresses over 10 years ago?
I don't remember anyone saying "we're going to run out of IPv4 addresses by the year 2003". If anyone told me that back then, I would have shown them the numbers to tell them how full of it they are. But we ARE running out of IPv4 addresses, however. It IS happening, right now. The IPv4 pool has dropped to less than two aggregate /8 blocks remaining.
Anyone who disagrees is free to go buy a huge block from ARIN and start selling them, because they're fetching a premium. You'll make a killing overnight.
Last edited by DowntownHarrisburg; 08-13-2013 at 07:04 PM..
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