data centers, Aug 2006 post on KnowledgeProblem

Data Centers & Power Use: another reason for Smart Grid

Here is an old but interesting post about data centers and smart grid: that is in the Knowledge Problem archives: http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/2007_08.html
The August 28, 2007 post is called Data Center Power Use, Storage, and Smart Grid, by Lynne Kiesling, and underscores how the increase in computing and Internet usage has had an impact on power consumption. The post has a link to an even older eWeek article from August 2006 that notes that IT administrators are becoming energy managers and are deeply involved in efforts to align data-center power demands with "green" movement goals. "
The post states that, "as the typical server unit has shrunk from a stand-alone pedestal the size of a filing cabinet to 2U (3.5-inch) stackables, 1U (1.75-inch) pizza boxes and even blades, both power and heat cause problems," and quotes one expert: "The whole industry has gotten hotter and more power-hungry. Within the last five years, servers went from using around 30 watts per processor to now more like 135 watts per processor ... You used to be able to put in up to six servers per rack; now it's up to 42."
It quotes a Berkeley National Labs source: "Every kilowatt burned by those servers requires another 1 to 1.5 kW to cool and support them." (Jon Koomey, a staff scientist and consulting professor at Stanford University).
Here's more from the same post:

In early 2007 Congress authorized the EPA to evaluate data center power use and cooling, and a separate industry report found that data center power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005. Yes, doubled.
Meanwhile, a data center power outage in July 2007 disrupted Internet activity at such popular sites as LiveJournal, Craigslist, Technorati, and TypePad. This very interesting analysis from O'Reilly discusses the continuous power system (CPS) flywheel backup system that the data center had in place:
The advantage of a CPS over a battery-based system is that the power going to the datacenter is decoupled from the utility power. This eliminates the complex electrical switching required from most battery-based systems, making many CPS systems simpler and sometimes more reliable.
In this incident, latent defects caused three generators to fail during start-up. No customers were affected until a fourth generator failed 30 seconds later, which overloaded the surviving backup system and caused power failures to 3 of 8 customer areas.
That failure was an interesting example of a cascading failure occurring in the backup system (but cascading failures are a subject for another post!). The large power use of data centers necessitates more sophisticated, or more complex, backup systems, so reducing datacenter power use could take some strain off of the redundant backup systems as well as reducing overall resource use.
More recently, this SmartCool blog discusses IBM's efforts to "green" their data centers, and this post makes a hugely important point:
The other aspect of the greening of datacenters is going to be green building techniques themselves. Intelligent management solutions like a SmartCool system or smart grid technology will go a long way to reducing the datacenter's infrastructure electricity demands, which makes up a considerable portion of the usage. Some suggestions exist out there for building more robust hardware that can withstand higher temperatures, but aside from a concern over expenses that do not offset, there's still going to be a need for air conditioning no matter how hardy the servers are; that kind of thing must be handled at the building infrastructure level.
I think data centers, and the enterprises that establish them, run them, and pay the power bills for them, should be and are on the vanguard of synthesizing hardware design and building design that take electricity prices and use patterns into account, that get the most "bang for the buck" out of each kilowatt consumed, and that will push the development of smart grid capabilities at the customer level.
To build a little bit on my criticism of Duke's Jim Rogers' top-down approach to energy efficiency last week, customer response, action, and innovation with respect to the data center power use issue illustrates how price signals and the dynamics of economic change create incentives for such customers to invest in energy efficiency technologies, in a decentralized and distributed way, that in aggregate can contribute substantially to reducing overall energy and resource use. When the incentives are there, presented through the transparency of true costs, customers will act.