Electricity Usage

An interesting article on America Infra (http://www.americainfra.com/news/powering-online-obsession/) shows the use of electricity and the growth of electrical power use in Data centers is doubling every 5 years. That may not seem like a lot but our current use is not sustainable due to growth of usage in other areas doing other things. Everytime you tweet or do a google search there is a data center that answers or relays your request or post, every message consumes power but the billions of messages and searches that the world makes every minute adds up quickly.

There is research into more power efficient cpus and storage devices and progress is being made. Netbook computers are powered by an energy efficient cpu, the Intel Atom, now manufacturers are starting to build servers using this processor. Other processors use other types of power management to slow the core processor or turn on or off additional cores so the processors matches the demands.

Storage systems are also going through an upheaval. More people are moving from magnetically encoded storage (Hard disks) to Solid State Drives. Solid state drives are much more energy efficient and as costs have come down they are a viable alternative.

Many new datacenters (Google is a good example) build solar and wind generators into the designs of new centers. The goal is to lessen the impact on the planet of these new datacenters. Combine this with new technology reducing demand within the center and you have a much lower impact on the power grid, and in some cases a new source of power has been created as well.

Think Green, switch it off if your not using it.

Kraig Geise - Senior Internet Analyst