Is the Data Center Power Drain an Urban Myth?

Are data centers the new resource-draining ‘factories’ of the 21st century? It’s no secret that large data center operators such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Amazon recently made strategic location decisions to position their lat­est data center construction projects within range of hydroelectric power, which is far cheaper and more abundant than traditional electricity from coal-fired plants.

One company, Equinix, is reported to be building a data center in Chicago with a server farm drawing up to 30 megawatts of power, which is enough electricity to power 30,000 houses. Some analysts estimate that a typical single server rack now demands up to 15 kilowatts of electricity – up from three just a few years back.

A new study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, underwritten by AMD, says as much. The study determined that electricity used by server comput­ers doubled between 2000 and 2005. The report stated that this surge in power con­sumption is largely attributable to the proliferation of cheap servers, lending cre­dence to IBM’s argument that server farms should be consolidated on System z machines.

The study also estimated that the total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $7.2 billion worldwide ($2.7 bil­lion for the U.S. alone). Servers and the infrastructure used to maintain these machines use about 45 billion kilowatt hours a year. That’s equivalent to the amount of power used by the state of Mississippi in 2005. Additional devices such as stor­age, network equipment, and client front-ends were not included in the calcula­tions.

It all sounds like a lot, and one can be forgiven for thinking that fast-growing data centers are about to suck our electric grid dry. But the Lawrence Berkeley study also pointed out that total power used by servers represented only about 0.6 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2 percent, ‘an amount compa­rable to that for color televisions,’ the study said. This equates to the equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1,000-megawatt power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world.

James Bushnell, research director of the University of California Energy Institute, summed it all up this way: The notion of data centers being the new industrial resource hogs is’an urban myth.’

Let’s take things a step further. I think someone ought to fund a study to see what the positive effects of mass computerization have been – how much are we con­serving in resources as a result of the move to information technology?

The Lawrence Berkeley study failed to take into account the overall savings in electric­ity and power usage as a result of mass computerization. The study’s author, Jonathan Koomey, of Lawrence Berkeley and Stanford University, admits right up front that the study “only assesses the direct electricity used by servers and associ­ated infrastructure equipment. It does not attempt to estimate the effect of struc­tural changes in the economy enabled by increased use of information technology, which in many cases can be substantial.”

These can be substantial indeed. Consider these potential areas of direct and indirect energy savings and you quickly get a very long list. Together, we’re prob­ably talking about more resources saved than that used up by servers. Consider: It can be assumed that e-business has drastically reduced the amount of paperwork moving inside and between organizations, with an ensu­ing savings in tree harvesting and energy consumed for the physical delivery of such documents.

• The e-commerce channel is now a strong part of many businesses, and it can be assumed that to some degree, it has replaced some bricks and mor­tar construction and management, and all the energy consumption that goes with that.
• Oil companies have been able to cut back on costly, time- consuming, sometimes environmentally risky drilling exploration because they can now model geologic environments with sophisticated tools running on large systems.
• There’s the less frequent travel required, since collaborative tools and platforms enable teams to work virtu­ally across the globe.
• Online and distance learning have brought campuses right to students’ homes, cutting down on travel to and from physical campuses. Likewise, telecommuting enabled through IT has cut down on work commutes.
• There have been industry-specific gains. For example, insurance com­panies leverage mobile technologies to cut down on trips made by claims adjusters out in the field – a savings that alone along ought to add up to quite a few barrels of oil.

Yes, your data center may be running up some huge electric bills, and it’s important to seek ways to cut this con­sumption with a more efficient infra­structure. But before the world starts jumping to conclusions that data cen­ters are depleting our energy resources, we need to see some studies on the pos­itive impact virtualized environments are having on our resources. I’m sure such information would open our eyes with amazement as to how much IT is really saving us in resources.