In all they save on the ‘infrastructure’costs, saving a ton on product (all those PDU’s), installation, maintenance (support contracts) and space (no way pdu’s will fit in those containers). Not to mention with all those rpdus you now have more devices on the network that have to be managed..and those have a failure rate as well. Plus, space is a huge issue with an industrial UPS application..they are saving space..saving on lighting etc).

Spec out a system from a UPS company to power the same amount of servers google has and you will see what I mean. It’s a matter of time before Dell and IBM ship with small 2-3 minute run time batteries in their servers (which can be monitored in the operating system easily – and integrated in to network node management software to alert when replacement is needed- this is already being done).

I’ve had this happen with the DC inverters I use as well.

Apparently, their voltage waveform is not good enough to satisfy the servers. Hence, if there is an interruption, the server restarts even though the UPS passes all self-tests.

Google is infamous for making themselves look green while truely hammering the enviroment. Google utilization rate on the servers usually is arround 10% so they can process data very quickly, if it were arround 70% they’d process info slower by they’d cut their energy bills dramatically. Also, they stopped cooling their servers with mechanical cooling to cut their energy. Which sounds green until you realize their failure rates on their servers will go up by 200%. Google makes their own servers so it’s cheaper but not sustainable to the planet. Look at the fact that according to the EPA we have more than 50 Million tons of e-waste that needs to be recycled (sent to china landfills) annually. If everyone took Googles approach we will soon be looking at the new Love Canal, in Palo Alto. Google needs to seriously look at themselves in the mirror.

What struck me is how much more electricity the Google data center appears to consume than a typical setup.
A rule of thumb for data center consumption is 30W/sqft… but Google has 1160 servers crammed into a shipping container (either 150sqft or 300sqft, depending on whether or not its a 20 or 40ft container). Each container uses 250kW!

For comparison and perspective, baseload power for a 10 story office building in Connecticut that I’ve done analysis for is just about 300kW.

To have distributed Batteries is not necessary Green though. DC UPS distribution with DC IT equipment would be a even better idea.