about cloud storage/data servers and the environment

[concise]

Cloud Data Centers Wasteful, Inefficient, Says NY Times - Network


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/t...ts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?_r=0

Data centers aren't usually front page news, but the Sunday New York Times put them center stage in an extensive article criticizing the infrastructure that supports the Web for inefficient practices that waste energy and pollute the environment. The article also questions Silicon Valley's green image, saying "...many data centers appear on the state government's Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area's top stationary diesel polluters."

It's no secret that data centers use mass quantities of power to keep servers humming and Web services available, but the Times article offers some staggering numbers: It places worldwide consumption of electricity at about 30 billion watts, or the output of around 30 nuclear power plants. It also estimates that U.S. data centers account for one-quarter to one-third of that electricity usage. According to an analysis by McKinsey & Co., which the Times requested, on average data centers use only 6% to 8% of their electricity for computation; most of the rest goes to keep servers at the ready for traffic surges.

In the meantime, many data centers also have diesel generators in place to keep the power running in the event of an outage on the electricity grid. But, as the Times reports, companies have run into trouble around environmental permits. It cites one case of Amazon being fined more than $260,000 for failing to obtain required permits for diesel generators at a location in Virginia.

The requirement for always-on availability is what drives energy consumption--and it isn't limited to the massive server farms run by Google, Facebook, Amazon and other Internet titans. Reliability and availability was the top application infrastructure requirement in the 2012 InformationWeek State of the Data Center survey, cited by 74% of respondents. In other words, enterprise data center operators are under just as much pressure as cloud providers to keep applications up and running.

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to process data. The study sampled about 20,000 servers in about 70 large data centers spanning the commercial gamut: drug companies, military contractors, banks, media companies and government agencies.

“This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to say mea culpa,” said a senior industry executive who asked not to be identified to protect his company’s reputation. “If we were a manufacturing industry, we’d be out of business straightaway.”

These physical realities of data are far from the mythology of the Internet: where lives are lived in the “virtual” world and all manner of memory is stored in “the cloud.”

The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation.

Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries — many of them similar to automobile batteries — to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers.



...
Aisle after aisle of servers, with amber, blue and green lights flashing silently, sat on a white floor punctured with small round holes that spit out cold air. Within each server were the spinning hard drives that store the data. The only hint that the center was run by Yahoo, whose name was nowhere in sight, could be found in a tangle of cables colored in the company’s signature purple and yellow.

“There could be thousands of people’s e-mails on these,” Mr. Tran said, pointing to one storage aisle. “People keep old e-mails and attachments forever, so you need a lot of space.”

This is the mundane face of digital information — player statistics flowing into servers that calculate fantasy points and league rankings, snapshots from nearly forgotten vacations kept forever in storage devices. It is only when the repetitions of those and similar transactions are added up that they start to become impressive.

 

[concise]

Others express deep skepticism of the cloud, saying that the sometimes mystical-sounding belief in its possibilities is belied by the physicality of the infrastructure needed to support it.

Using the cloud “just changes where the applications are running,” said Hank Seader, managing principal for research and education at the Uptime Institute. “It all goes to a data center somewhere.”

Some wonder if the very language of the Internet is a barrier to understanding how physical it is, and is likely to stay. Take, for example, the issue of storing data, said Randall H. Victora, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota who does research on magnetic storage devices.

“When somebody says, ‘I’m going to store something in the cloud, we don’t need disk drives anymore’ — the cloud is disk drives,” Mr. Victora said. “We get them one way or another. We just don’t know it.”

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