Data Center Energy Savings

The growth of data centers and server farms has been a critical infrastructure component to the Digital Age.  We are in the midst of the greatest data center building boom ever seen.

The number of servers in the U.S. has grown from 5 million in 2000, to 10 million in 2005, to a projected 15 million in 2010. More servers eat up more electricity and energy costs go up. To avoid future energy shortages caused by increasing IT demands, 10 more power plants need to be built to the tune of $2 billion to $6 billion each and their cost is ultimately going to get passed on to IT through increased utility bills.

While exact numbers are confidential, analysts expect that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent roughly $4.7 billion in capital expenditures, double 2005 levels.

Microsoft is building a 1.4-million-square-foot campus in Quincy, Wash., close to hydroelectric power. Company officials acknowledge that centers in the South and Europe will come afterward.

Yahoo, meanwhile, also has purchased 50 acres in Quincy for a server farm. Google is constructing a two-building complex on 30 acres of former farmland in Oregon at John Day Dam on the Columbia River.

The Google facility will contain some of the estimated half-million to one million (only Google knows for sure) servers that the company operates to handle 2.7 billion online searches a month, its Gmail service, and other applications. Experts figure such a project could easily cost in excess of $150 million; Google, of course, isn't saying. 

All of these server farms consume significant amounts of energy, often as much energy  as a city consumes.   There is the direct energy consumption of the servers as well as the energy required to cool the servers.  It is common to assume that for every dollar spent to power the server, there is another dollar spent to cool the server.  Some estimate the cost to be even higher:

Spending $2,500 on a server really means spending between $8,300 and $15,400 in facility capital to provide the necessary space for housing the server and powering it.

The explosion of the Information Age has lead to serious concerns about the environmental impact of this rapid growth in server farms. Dave Douglas, Vice President, Eco-Responsibility, Sun Microsystems stresses the environmental impact of this server farm explosion, stating:

It is estimated that the total greenhouse gas emissions of servers is upwards of 200 million tons of carbon dioxide in the U.S. alone right now. And if you gather up the worldwide statistics, I believe the number might be as high as a billion tons of CO2. That's a significant chunk of the roughly 27 billion tons emitted worldwide by all human activity each year.

Industry’s Efforts to reduce Data Center Power costs

Gartner stated that “today, energy costs typically form less than 10 percent of an overall IT budget. However, this could rise to more than 50 percent in the next few years."   As energy costs increase, there is a growing industry movement to reduce the energy consumption of data centers.

One evidence of this is the formation of the non-profit organization called The Green Grid. The organization is chartered to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers. Recent inductees at the April 2007 conference were “Cisco, Juniper Networks, Novell and Texas Instruments joining equally heavy-weight founding members AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware in fighting the green fight.”

Other companies are spending significant resources to reduce data center costs.  "If I saved just $10 in the operation of each of those servers, that's $10 million per year," says Greg Papadopolous, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems. "So how much would you be willing to invest in order to save $10 per server? This is exactly the discussion companies had around the time of the Industrial Revolution."

IBM recently announced their “Project Big Green”.  IBM is allocating $1 billion per year to combat the Data Center Energy Crisis and to advance green technologies.

Called "Project Big Green," IBM's initiative targets corporate data centers where energy constraints and costs can limit their ability to grow. The initiative includes a new global "green team" of more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM.

Today, according to analyst firm IDC, roughly 50 cents is spent on energy for every dollar of computer hardware. This is expected to increase by 54 percent to 71 cents over the next four years.

"The data center energy crisis is inhibiting our clients' business growth as they seek to access computing power," said Mike Daniels, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology Services. "Many data centers have now reached full capacity, limiting a firm's ability to grow and make necessary capital investments. Today we are providing clients the IBM action plan to make their data centers fully utilized and energy efficient."

IBM currently runs the world's largest commercial technology infrastructure, with more than eight million square feet of data centers in six continents. By using the same energy efficiency initiatives it is offering clients today, IBM expects to double the computing capacity of its data centers within the next three years without increasing power consumption or its carbon footprint. Compared to doubling the size of its data centers by building out new space, IBM expects this will help save more than five billion kilowatt hours of energy per year.

Perfect Search Environmental Savings

Because Perfect Search technology allows for a greater query throughput per server, fewer servers are needed to perform the same volume of queries. If the same volume of queries can be handled by fewer servers, then there would be a significant reduction in server farm energy costs to users of the technology. This dramatic reduction in energy costs leads to a reduction in the environmental impact of the server farm.