Articles: Energy Crisis From Overpowered Internet Servers?

According to Information Week data center electricity costs are increasing by $3.3 billion a year, and the number of servers is jumping by 50% every four years. Between 2004 and 2005, business electricity costs increased by 20% to 40%. Rackspace saw an increase in 2005 of 65%, an increase of $1 million a year. Their primary concern for locating a new data center is the cost of power.

Yahoo houses 200,000 servers in 27 data centers. Low power CPUS are becoming re important than faster processors. According to some estimates, Yahoo may pay as much as $6 million annually just to run a single 160,000 sq. ft. data center in Santa Clara. Their total costs may be $20 million to $50 million annually. Space leased for $12-$20 a sq. foot can cost $60 per sq. foot for cooling. This causes Yahoo to have a relatively spacious data center, because they run out of power before they run out of space.

One solution to power loads is Virtualization technologies. Virtualization technologies let several virtual machines to run within a single server, sharing the CPU, and disk space of each virtual server. When you have a typical server at 5% average utilization, 10 or 20 of those servers can be Virtualized onto a single machine. This can result in tremendous savings in hardware costs, especially since many individual servers are over specified for what their mission is. Some virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft Virtual PC, seem to require the host machine to have an amount of ram equal to the sum total of ram needed by all the Virtual machines that are being hosted.

New Energy Associates has found that replacing older machines with AMD power performance optimized processors, along with virtualizations, allows them a 7 to 1 replacement ratio, saving 84% in heat generation. Dual core chips have helped. Quad core processors, due to be available in early 2007, will further reduce power usage. Other companies, such as Azul Systems have 24 processing cores on their chips.

According to ID, the annual electric bill for a high-end server can cost $8,760.

Blader servers allow denser computing, but this density also creates a challenge in cooling. In a paper in 2003, Google calcualted that an 80-unit rack of midrange servers with 1.4GHZ PIII processors requires 400 watts of electricity per sq. foot, which exceeds the average data center's capability of 150 watts per sq. foot. Cost efficiency is as important as power efficiency.

Hewlett-Packard is trying environmental control using water cooling.

Pomona Valley Medical Center has two 5-ton air conditioners for their data center, but when one of the air conditioners failued, data center temperatures went to 102 degrees, and it caused hard drives to fail. The repair cost was about $40,000. They implemented a solution using Liebert XDV. 20 of these units were the equivalent of 44 tons of air conditioning.

Sources:

• Information Week Feb 27, 2006