Standing atop the elevated floors – reporting the state of data center (Part 1)

On June 13, 2013, Telegraph reported that the Facebook's Lulea data center is averaging a PUE of 1.07 at which time when others only manage an average of 2.0.

PUE stands for ‘Power Usage Efficiency’; it is a standard for the data center industry and is measured as the output of ‘Total Facility Power’ divides by ‘IT Equipment Power’. The ideal PUE score is 1.0 and it implies that every unit of power supply is fully utilized to power IT equipments in the data center; a score of 2.0 means that the powering of IT equipments is two times inefficient.

As the matter of fact, the state of the art data center is located at Lulea, Sweden within the Arctic Circle and is powered by hydro-energy. All technology is based on Open Compute Project designs and this explains the score of 1.07; it is highly efficient in terms of green power consumption.

The unbearable heat…

Green power consumption is the biggest debate of the industry at current time. On June 2013, Google published a blog post about a study, conducted by Berkeley Lab who found that by migrating all U.S. office workers to the cloud could save up to 87 percent of IT energy use—about 23 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, or enough to power the city of Los Angeles for a year.

The savings are associated with shifting people in the workforce to Internet-based applications like email, word processing and customer relationship software.

What’s more staggering is the fact that 33 units of energy consumed at the point of use require 100 units of primary energy (the coal required to supply that energy unit).



In another report by EITN, data centers worldwide today consume 30 gigawatts of electricity or the equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants. The biggest pain point is that 90% of these energy are wasted to powering idle servers.

It follows that the war on waste – a focus on ‘negawatts’, or watts not used – will deliver the best returns for businesses.

Impacts of global warming


Hence, myriad innovations and solutions aim to solve the green power consumption challenges follow suit.

The trends of data center are:
  • Green power consumption
  • Virtualization and cloud computing
  • Security
  • Disaster recovery
  • Compliance
  • Peering
  • Location or real-estate

Read the full article.

Comments

Unknown said…
Loved it This article gives the light in which we can observe the reality.


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