Data Center Possibilities by Dan Brown

In 2005 Google datacenter engineer Luiz Andre Barroso wrote, “The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet.” That same year was the point in which data center power usage had doubled in comparison to just 5 years before.

In 2000, 5.6 million servers (approximately) were installed throughout the U.S. data centers, consisting of 4.9 million low end servers, 650,000 mid range servers, and 23,000 high-end servers. By 2005 data centers eclipsed 10.3 million servers, consisting of 9.9 million low-end servers.

These low-end servers seem to be the cause of much of the increase in power consumption. They generally cost less than 25,000 U.S. dollars, and are being bought at rates that are packing data centers to the point of a crunch. In the U.S. alone data center power consumption was equivalent to that produced by 5 one thousand megawatt power plants. Electricity consumption was higher, at nearly the equal to 14 power plants. The electric bill to operate those data centers and related equipment was a staggering $ 2.7 billion in 2005 alone. This translates into 0.6% of the total energy consumption for the U.S. that year.

In order for data center power management to make an impact, companies of electrical power technology or others need to take action. There are numerous strategies companies can take to cut power use, global demand, and prices for themselves and others. Virtualization software, better or well developed cooling systems and strategies, even changing their power supply hardware. Companies should also be more aware of the costs related to owning and operating computer systems and gear. Today only about 30% of companies are putting effort into researching and developing new ways to cool and power their servers as a way to lower costs.

Yet many management level employees of top businesses are still unaware of options as simple as dual-core processing.

$2.7 billion is more than necessary in data center spending. Period.

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Dan Brown
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