Google's announcements this week on efficiency, electricity use, and carbon emissions
This week Google announced more details on their efficiency, electricity use, and carbon emissions. This is a big deal because it will give much of the rest of the industry efficiency targets to which they can aspire. Most of the other cloud computing companies have figured out clever tricks to improve their efficiency, but it’s the “in-house” data centers (the ones owned and operated by companies whose primary business is not computing) who have the most to learn from these announcements (and from the announcement of the Open Compute Project by Facebook awhile back).
Google’s announcement is also important because it puts real data on how much electricity is actually used for a search or the download of a Youtube video. Some of you may recall the little dustup about whether a Google search uses as much as boiling a pot of tea (it doesn’t, as Evan Mills and I documented here). But the biggest story is not about direct electricity use, it’s about the efficiency improvements in other energy uses enabled by the electricity used by data centers and other information technology equipment. As I describe in my recent report, the world’s data centers use roughly 1.3% of global electricity use, but they help us use the other 98.7% of that electricity as well as most of the rest of the other energy use a whole lot more efficiently.
Google’s announcements also confirm the points I made in my post on why cloud computing is more efficient, and the large savings from cloud computing estimated by WSP Environment and Energy when analyzing salesforce.com’s operations. Cloud computing will continue to pressure “in-house” data center operations because costs in the cloud are so much lower, a result driven significantly by much greater energy efficiency and equipment utilization.
There have been some helpful summaries exploring these announcements. The article at Data Center Dynamics was particularly interesting because it gives detail on the techniques Google uses to achieve high efficiency. Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm also did a nice job in one of her articles of putting the announcements in a larger context, as well as giving some details in another article about the relative efficiency of Gmail compared to “in-house” email hosting.
Other articles have appeared at the New York Times, AP, London’s Financial Times, the San Jose Mercury News, Renewable Energy Magazine, and Data Center Knowledge.
