30 Billion W energy (90% wasted) Industry? Internet Data Centres!

@ramani-VR4O43 • Oct 27, 2024

Oct 27, 2024

1.3K

It has been estimated that the servers for internet consume 30 Billion Watts of energy of which 90% is wasted.

â€œThis is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to say mea culpa,â€ said a senior industry executive who asked not to be identified to protect his companyâ€™s reputation. â€œIf we were a manufacturing industry, weâ€™d be out of business straightaway.â€

<a href="https://www.neatorama.com/2012/09/23/Dirty-Secrets-of-Internet-Data-Centers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+%28Neatorama%29" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dirty Secrets of Internet Data Centers - Neatorama</a>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - The New York Times</a>
What are the opinions of CEans on this?

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Jeffrey Arulraj

@jeffrey-xA7lUP • Sep 24, 2012

Is there a way of reutilising this power lost sir for i think the world will stop without Network but power lost has to be minimised in some way
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Ramani Aswath

@ramani-VR4O43 • Sep 24, 2012

jeffrey samuel
Is there a way of reutilising this power lost sir for i think the world will stop without Network but power lost has to be minimised in some way
Unfortunately this is lost as heat. Even more energy is spent on AC for cooling the data centres. I am afraid that so far there is no simple way to recover this heat.
Here is some info on the energy needed for one Google search:
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sauravgoswami

@sauravgoswami-UAfTlI • Sep 24, 2012

We can chanellise this heat and use it for generating power or any other use,but that will be costly solution,unfortunately data is more important and companies find this loss to minimal compare to important data which these servers maintain.
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durga ch

@durga-TpX3gO • Sep 24, 2012

That applies for all major DCs across the world and that seems mostly the reason why reasearch work in 'green technologies' for SAN/datcentre networks are being suggested. Currently Green research on DCs include, good ventilation techniques, cooling techniques, efficient power utilisation techniques and virtualisation techniques .
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Ashraf HZ

@Ash • Sep 25, 2012

durga
That applies for all major DCs across the world and that seems mostly the reason why reasearch work in 'green technologies' for SAN/datcentre networks are being suggested. Currently Green research on DCs include, good ventilation techniques, cooling techniques, efficient power utilisation techniques and virtualisation techniques .
Seems that most power is wasted on servers that are idle or comatose in terms of tasks. The article states on average 6-12% utilization on DCs, most of the power is for running back up resources in case of traffic surge or failure, or maybe more redundant processes. Not a surprise considering service providers that need like 99.999% uptime 😛 So while we can make some progress in terms of green research, increasing the computational utilization would probably decrease the wastage more effectively.
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grsalvi

@grsalvi-7IhIh1 • Sep 27, 2012

Well anybody remembers a 3 year back invention called 'bloom box'...A compact fuel cell designed to generate pollution free energy at corporate campus.I remember the news said it is operation for few corporate parks.
check out : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy_Server
👍
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Ramani Aswath

@ramani-VR4O43 • Sep 28, 2012

DARPA to the rescue?
An update:
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