I just found out today that 1.2% of the electricity consumption in the US was due to data centers and the massive arrays of servers and cooling equipment that they hold (45 billion kilowatt-hours of energy were consumed in 2005).
Worldwide figures say however, that data centers account for about 0.8% of the total global energy consumption. And the other bad news is that between 2000 and 2005, the total number of data centers doubled. These figures were taken from a study commissioned by AMD and was reviewed by major server companies as well as Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and Dell.
I wouldn’t be surprised, considering that on an average 1 Million domain names are registered per month. According to Netcraft, at the start of February, there were 108,810,358 domain names on the net, an additional 1.93 million sites added from the previous month. 50 Million of those domain names were considered active. Add to that, that the number of internet users are constantly growing, fueled by lower hardware costs and dropping broadband rates.
There is hope however as major companies have already taken notice of the high energy costs of computing equipment and are starting to design computer equipment that are less energy hungry. 2006 was the year that Intel and AMD have been making marketing pitches of having the less power consuming processor.
Server power demand has moved high up customer priority lists–especially with rising power costs and overstuffed data centers–and hardware makers are responding. Among the touted fixes are energy-efficient processors, power consumption caps, water cooling and consolidation of work from numerous inefficient low-end servers to fewer, more-powerful machines.
The US Congress has also put the government on the issue as a bill was passed last December 2006 calling for a study on how to reduce the power consumption of Data Centers.
Category: Misc
