[LINK] Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYTimes.com

[Jim Birch]

Bernard Robertson-Dunn <brd at iimetro.com.au> wrote:

> The answer is no, it's not. It turns out that if you halve the clock
> speed, the CPU power consumption drops to less than a quarter.
>

Good point, but these relationships apply to data centres too, and they are
going to take them seriously if they have large power bills.  They will
also weigh up the cost of power savings against the cost of equipment -
which is at least in part a measure of energy expenditure in production.
As they are buying both their equipment and power at closer to production
cost there will be less at economic distortion of the costs due to the sort
of things that influence small operations, like retail markups, supplier
relationships, technology fashions, lack of expertise, etc.  Data centres
will include power consumption in their hardware selection and replacement
choices, where this is not a big *economic* driver with a handful  of
servers. I guess the big distortion for data centres is the requirement of
100% uptime/reliability where a lesser standard may be acceptable elsewhere
where the cost/reliability tradeoff is different.

Energy cost itself is distorted due to the AGW/pollution externality but
this applies to more-or-less everyone.  And a lot of people seem to think
this is a good idea, anyway :|

Jim