Category Archives: Environmental issues

Down on the server farm

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Interesting piece in this week’s Economist about the environmental impact of cloud computing.

Internet firms, meanwhile, need ever larger amounts of computing power. Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft’s $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts. As a result, finding a site for a large data centre is now, above all, about securing a cheap and reliable source of power, says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, a website that chronicles the boom in data-centre construction.

The availability of cheap power is mainly why there are so many data centres in Quincy. It is close to the Columbia River, with dams that produce plenty of cheap hydroelectric power. There is water for cooling, fast fibre-optic links, and the remoteness provides security. For similar reasons, Google chose to build a new data centre at The Dalles, a hamlet across the Columbia River in the state of Oregon.

Such sites are in short supply in America, however. And with demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape…

Data smelting

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Slight Economist article on the energy demands of cloud computing…

AS ONE industry falls, another rises. The banks of the Columbia River in Oregon used to be lined with aluminium smelters. Now they are starting to house what might, for want of a better phrase, be called data smelters. The largest has been installed by Google in a city called The Dalles. Microsoft and Yahoo! are not far behind. Google’s plant consumes as much power as a town of 200,000 people. And that is why it is there in the first place. The cheap hydroelectricity provided by the Columbia River, which once split apart aluminium oxide in order to supply the world with soft-drinks cans and milk-bottle tops, is now being used to shuffle and store masses of information. Computing is an energy-intensive industry. And the world’s biggest internet companies are huge energy consumers—so big that they are contemplating some serious re-engineering in order to curb their demand…

Strangely, it makes no mention of virtualisation.

Why the cloud might not have a silver lining

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This morning’s Observer column…

Many people believe that cloud computing is the logical next step for the industry. It’s the proposition on which the vast Google ranch has been wagered. (It’s also the reason why Microsoft – a platform-based company – is so eager to acquire Yahoo.) The prominent technology commentator Nicholas Carr has just published a book called The Big Switch in which he argues that what’s happening to computing now is analogous to what happened to electricity generation a century ago. Once upon a time, every industrial firm had its own generator; but eventually organisations plugged into a grid with cheap electricity pumped out by specialist generating companies. Something similar, Carr claims, is happening now to computing: it’s becoming a public utility, rather than a service that firms provide for themselves…

The mainframe lives!

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The concern with energy costs and environmental impacts of cloud computing is increasing. Here’s Technology Review an IBM’s new mainframe.

IBM Corp. rolls out a new mainframe computer Tuesday boasting a 50 percent performance boost and dramatically lower energy costs than its predecessor.

The new System z10, with a starting price at about $1 million, comes as IBM focuses on lowering the price tag for running its storied line of data-crunching workhorses.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based company said it designed the new machine to help companies and government agencies that rely on mainframes — usually for critical data processing such as bank transactions or census statistics crunching — save money on energy bills and better handle a flood of Internet information.

IBM says that the new machine was designed to appeal to cost-conscious companies looking to consolidate the number of servers in their data centers.

The z10’s capacity is equivalent to 1,500 servers based on the popular x86 design, IBM says, though it has 85 percent lower energy costs and takes up 85 percent less space than the batch of x86 servers.

Second Life: First World energy consumption

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Nick Carr has a post in which he uses some data supplied by Linden Labs (proprietors of Second Life) to show that an avatar in that benighted corner of cyberspace consumes as much electricity as the average Brazilian.

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars “living” in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars’ physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:

(4,000 x 250 x 24) (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours

Per capita, that’s:

60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh

Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they’re in the same ballpark.

I have some good friends who are dedicated environmental campaigners, but who are also evangelical about the potential of Second Life. I wonder what they think about the energy issue.

And, just to be fair, everything that applies to Second Life’s energy consumption applies to cloud computing generally.