Despite recent reports about cost-savings associated with green data centers, there still are skeptics who believe the greening might be too little too late.
“There’s a freight train coming that most people do not see, and it’s that you’re going to run out of power and you won’t be able to keep your data center cool enough,” Rob Bernard, the chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, warned attendees at the recent Uptime Symposium 2010 in New York City. “We haven’t fundamentally changed the way we do things. We’ve done a lot of great stuff at the infrastructure level, but we haven’t changed our behavior.”
According to Computerworld, speakers at the conference pointed to a number of different power-sucking culprits, including energy-indifferent application programming, siloed organizational structures, and, ironically, better hardware. They estimated that the average CPU utilization — the number of processor cycles that are actually tasked with doing something — hovered somewhere between 5 percent and 25 percent. (Note: Managed Virtualized Services like those offered by EasyStreet can help with CPU utilization.)
Conference attendees were reminded that in 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy predicted that data center energy consumption would double by 2011 to more than 120 billion kilowatt-hours. According to Computerworld, this prediction seems to be playing out: An ongoing survey from the Uptime Institute found that, from 2005 to 2008, the electricity usage of its members’ data centers grew at an average of about 11 percent a year.