You listening in, congress? Get to work on that! =P

It certainly is a good idea to think about how to save power, but not at the expense of not being able to actually serve up customer load.

http://storageeffect.com/2007/12/19/a-third-way-for-internet-infrastructure/

Verrari and Rackable are leading the way, but the solutions are just beginning to evolve.

thanks for that catch. Appreciate it.

In your original post, you say “50.5 billion kilowatts per hour” and you mean “50.5 billion kilowatt hours”. (The source paper by Koomey is correct.) I see an awful lot of discussion of energy consumption where the numbers make no sense. My pet peeve is that people are sloppy with the math (and especially the units). In debates like this, let’s at least get that part of it right.

The limits on air cooling hit diminishing return at about 250 watts per foot. Anything past that is going to require an alternative method for cooling….it may be chilled water similar to the mainframes of the past or it may be some liquid based design. Of course there are scenarios where these high density cabinets are running fine in certain data centers but they very isolated and are not the standard configuration of every cabinet in the facility.

When companies like amazon and google use outsourced facilities and install their cabinets which consume 10kw each, they are typically buying about 5x more space than they need because that is the only way they are able to get that much power and the associated cooling capacity in a fixed resource environment like a data center.

The problem doesn’t go away with a grid infrastructure…it just shifts from being the responsibility of the customer(the one who is purchasing the grid service) to the operator of the grid platform or to their data center vendor. So while the problem many companies are challenged with today may be solved by closing their own data centers and outsourcing their computing requirements to a grid provider, it doesn’t make the problem disappear, it just compounds it for someone else. Unless I’m mistaken, you can’t change the fundamentals of physics, or more specifically to this case, you can’t force air to cool more than it’s physically capable of doing so you are forced to use alternative techniques and strategies. Hence the talk of bringing chilled water back to the data center floor which is unthinkable to most internet people but was common practice in the past.

That is what I was trying to say – if Grid is the future, the power issue is something we might want to think about “harder.” Or did I mis-understand your comment.

I think this is going to become more of an issue going forward as we move stuff to the cloud.

http://www.windley.com/archives/2007/12/dc_power_in_datacenters.shtml

I’ll say what I said there though – I agree with Phil in his article that there is not enough demand for DC in the datacenter. Companies just aren’t demanding it right now – where as they should be. It saves trees and dollars.

Two ways to address the issue that I’ve seen here at work are higher quality VRMs (voltage regulators), and higher-efficient power supplies. Most vendors range in efficiency for the PWS between 70-80%. There are motherboards and servers out there that use higher-quality VRMs AND highly-efficient PWS’s. Here is a review of one by AnandTech that achieves over 90% efficiency and reduces the pizza-box footprint in half:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2997

Blade servers are also being addressed by many companies as pointed out earlier, and reports that I have show that a 93% efficient PWS with 10 blades can save 1051 kW/hour per year and over $4,700 per 3 years, for each blade server w/10 blades. Now that’s hard $$ that a company will take to the bank if it would switch to a row of blade servers in the datacenter that had that kind of savings.