Data Center Energy Usage

Data Center

We are in the midst of a major IT revolution where more and more applications are moving to the "Cloud". With the rise in cloud-computing and Software as a Service (SaaS), there is an accompanying rise in large data centers that host these applications and data in the "cloud". Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and virtually every major IT company is providing some type of cloud infrastructure of their own. With this rapid rise in cloud computing, the electricity needed to power these data centers is also growing at a tremendous rate and doubling every 5-years or so.

In 2006, the energy used in data centers was around 61 Gigawatt-hours representing around 1.5% of *all* US Electricity consumption. Just to put this in perspective, this is equivalent to about 5.8 Million average households and the dollar cost of this electricity is around $4.5 Billion. By 2011, the data center consumption is expected to cross 100 Gigawatt-hours (about 12 Gigawatt peak power) at a cost of about $7.5 Billion. 

It is estimated that the cost of electricity of running a server outpaces the cost of the server in about 4-years. Clearly, if we compare this to any other appliance (like our Car), the ratio is just way out of line (of course, we don't run our car 24/7/365 like these servers). But still, it is clear that more energy efficient servers are a huge lever as far as the overall data center operating costs go. 

Another equally important factor determining the data center energy cost is the efficiency factor. This is the ratio of total energy used by the data center to the energy used in the servers themselves (i.e. useful energy towards computing). The best of breed data centers have managed to push this ratio down to around 1.4X by innovative rack and building designs and heat dissipation techniques. More typical number is around 1.8X for the industry at this point. 

Clearly there is some serious opportunity in improving the overall data center efficiency all around - in design of hardware, building and also software to manage the scheduling of computing tasks in a more energy efficient manner. A lot of the large data center operators are becoming power producers themselves and are now locating the facilities near the source of the power to reduce power costs. They are also trading directly in the wholesale power markets instead of buying electricity from a utility company. It would be interesting to see what role electric storage can play in the operation of these data centers by storing electricity when the cost of electricity is low and then using it at times of high demand.