I use a variety of ways to track the news these days and few use traditional paper publications. I mostly use web-based and, yes, cloud computing applications to manage the inflow of news. These primarily consist of Google Reader, Google alerts, Twitter, and email newsletters. I bring this up for two reasons:
#1. Because unlike physical magazines or journals I don’t actually own any of this content I read. It’s all stored somewhere else, in various data centers around the world, waiting for me to access it.
#2. It’s a great example of how web-based tools can increase the efficiency of my life, and even decrease my energy footprint.
This latter point is important, because it’s what a lot of us people interested in data center efficiency stress all the time: we don’t want people to stop using data centers and the tools they provide, we just want data centers to follow best practices and minimize their energy footprint while providing the same level of service.
As an example of my news review practices, I just skimmed the titles of probably over a hundred articles in a pretty short time (~30 minutes). Of the few articles I actually skimmed or read, I found this interesting blog post on the data center temperature debate. This is not a blog I follow, or an issue I follow particularly closely, but after scouring my many news sources this is the article that caught my eye enough to post about. It does a good job of explaining the issues around data center temperature setpoints and the arguments of whether they result in energy savings. The bottom line, as usual, is that energy savings will likely depend on your specific situation – if it allows you to cool more with outside air it’ll likely help, if it just causes your server fans to kick into higher gear it might not.
I’m not going to take one side or the other on this issue, but what I think is interesting is this: for years, engineers have overdesigned everything. Structures are built with a factor of safety of many times the needed strength; capacities are built out well over requirements just in case more is needed later or something goes wrong; and, yes, data centers are kept much colder than they need to be just to be safe. In some cases these decisions are based more on superstition than sound engineering. One of the things computers and servers have given us is the ability to dial in and optimize some of these design points through computer aided design, advanced monitoring, automated controls, etc.
Here’s where it all comes together: these new tools should allow a savvy data center operator to dial in the correct cooling level across the data center and not have to significantly overdesign the cooling system or setpoints. Good monitoring should identify problems quickly or even before they occur. Good controls should alter settings to compensate for potential problems. The two together should be tuned to optimize efficiency and decrease costs. I’d be willing to bet that for the majority of data centers there can be significant energy savings by increasing temperatures, but you need to use these tools to address potential hotspots and to determine if that increase should be 1 degree, 2 degrees or 10 degrees. Too much or too little and there may not be savings, or worse, there could be an increase in energy use.
So, in summary, we continue to keep using computers and data centers to increase efficiencies across all aspects of the economy, and, of course, use these techniques on data centers to slow the energy growth of these tools themselves.
Now, if I could just get the Economist to forward my magazine subscription to my new address. How could this possibly take 3 weeks in this day and age? Maybe that will be the subject of another post. No matter, I’ll just read it online…
