How Google Fights Power Consumption

In a similar vein to our previous posts about more efficient CPUs and more efficient software, this TG Daily article tells us a bit about how mega-huge search giant Google battles its ever-increasing thirst for energy. "'Over four years, the power costs of running a PC can add up to half of the hardware cost,' says Google vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle. '[O]ne of the major inefficiency [is] DC power supplies that are typically about 70% efficient but reach 90% at Google.' Hoelzle says that Google is working with component makers to accelerate the time-to-market of more efficient devices, such as motherboards with a smaller number of DC voltage inputs. Other strategies of limiting power losses include more efficient software as well as an effort to improve the physical design layout of a data center". The sooner this reaches "consumer grade" electronics, the better. So much energy is completely wasted right now, we could certainly shut down many coal power plants if only we started to seriously work on that problem. ::How Google battles its increasing power consumption, via ::Digg