How Google Fights Power Consumption
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 11.20.05
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
Enough LED's! - Here is a post on Butterflies. and LED's. Sorry.
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Interesting. Google finally wakes up to their energy problem - I guess that is a good thing.
It's only taken them over 2.5 years!
To put this in context, a number of luminaries from the world of 'data centers' gathered together in California in early 2003, for an event that had been over a year in planning - the Rocky Mountain Institute High Performance Data Center charrette.
The idea was to come up with practical solutions to the 'energy problem' that is self evident to anyone involved in the Data Center business, especially following the 'Californian Energy Crisis'.
In true RMI style, this was to be collaborative, and open, a meeting of experts, of industry shapers, all coming together to work on how we could evolve an ICT infrastructure that had a radically reduced footprint - to do for Data Centers what the Hyper-Car did for the automotive industry.
Google refused to take part.
Google refused to attend.
According to source close to the company, who at that time tried to get them along, Google denied that they had any problems whatsoever with energy efficiency, and couldn't benefit from attending, and were unwilling to attend to share their self-proclamed expertise with others that were willing to take part - the 'Google Data Centre Guy' came across as arrogant, conceited, selfish and short-sighted.
That someone at Google has finally figured out the source and efficiency of the energy they use is important is great, I hope Mr Hoezle can make greater headway internally with moving 'energy efficiency' forward.
How about they change the catch line from 'don't be evil' to 'don't be arrogant and short-sighted'?
Or go one further.. 'be good' 'be excellent' 'be co-operative' all work for me.
Sounds good, but these two guys tooling around in a 747, the Hummer of the skies, doesn't help with sustainability or global warming.
Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/
gotta love the anon_coward!!
me, i don't know anything about G's behaviour, and i am SHOCKED that anyone in the new economy would have shortsighted vision (ha ha ha..)
but seriously folks... if you happen to run a company with lots of computers (say an insurance giant with 12,000 PCs or a pharma with 5,000 PCs, or even a major retail chain (with 8,000) what you want to look into is this Power Management software from a company in the UK called 1E. their power management softs let you save $300 per pc per year and a whopping .7 Metric Tons CO2/year
usually companies do their IT after hours and therefore leave all computers on-- this little do-hickey allows the IT managers to power up and shut down remoteley so you only have to leave computers on when they are being used(!) and when software is being upgraded, but not at 3:00am for no reason but to burn cash....
Why not just put the computers up here in Canada where you can use air from outside 8 months a year to cool everything up.