Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYT

[jsr]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html

September 22, 2012
Power, Pollution and the Internet
By JAMES GLANZ

...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.” ...

[a geek named Bob]

1. hmmm...

how about routing the diesel fumes through "water filters" and collecting the CO2 to run greenhouses?
The Greenhouses then create bio-diesel, which helps run the generators.

[porphyrian]

5. Good idea. They could also use wind and solar generators rather than diesel or as supplementals. n/t

[a geek named Bob]

6. Wind and solar are good as incidentals

but you need a power storage system to make for continuous power.

Personally, I'd go for something like this:
1.) grow pond scum in greenhouses
2.) create bio-diesel from the pond scum
3.) use the bio-diesel for generators
4.) run the exhaust through "water filters" to clean the exhaust
4a.) the CO2 from the exhaust gets sent to the greenhouses (which helps the pond scum)
4b.) the remaining non-CO2 materials from the exhaust, now trapped in the water, gets polymerized into plastics
5.) the plastics get used to create filters for the generators, membranes for batteries, and maybe parts piles for the servers

[porphyrian]

7. That's an awesome plan. n/t

[a geek named Bob]

8. thakns, porphyrian

It's the first thing I could come up with...

give me some time, and I can probably figure out a better, and more robust system.

[porphyrian]

9. If you work in a green roof, you can minimize or eliminate water run off as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_roof

[a geek named Bob]

10. hmmm...

that might provide the water for the "water filters."

[porphyrian]

11. There you go. This kind of roof cuts down on heating and cooling, too. n/t

[a geek named Bob]

12. Also... we could use the roof space for growing citrus

I know far too many IT folks that need vitamin C (also, they need B-complex, but that usually needs a LOT of room for grains)

[porphyrian]

13. Ha! Most IT people I know only get vitamins from Mountain Dew, but why not?

The waste could be composted and reused for fertilizer.

[a geek named Bob]

14. gotta be better than mountain dew...

with the added benefit of saving a lot of sets of teeth...

[snooper2]

2. I find this article to be funny LOL

The generators only run if their is an issue with line current coming in. We also have these cool things called batteries for backup power. What do they want, servers to be shut down and brought back upon multiple times a day based on load. I'm sure any operations org. would love the prospect of that

I guess we should power down redundant routers as well and only bring them up if their is an outage. We'll have to take the five nines and make it one nine. processing power about doubles every 18 months so at least they did mention that in the article. It took a 4U server for 60K voip subscribers on one of our platforms six years ago. Now I can run a 1RU server with half a million.

[hootinholler]

3. Hmm the cloud is actually made of diesel fuel smoke?

They do know that the diesels run when line power is inadequate, right? Well, they do run in a test mode now and then to ensure they will start when needed.

I do agree that many unnecessary servers are kept online when they might be better virturalized, but people who pay for servers (like me) want them available 24/7, which is what I am paying for in the case of my domain.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. Just when it is becoming the "norm", the cloud has now been deemed obsolete