NYTimes.com today on data center cooling
James Kanter has a very nice article on NYTimes.com today on data centers and the search for ever better ways to cool those facilities. Typical “in-house” data centers nowadays devote one kWh of electricity to cooling, pumps, fans, and power systems for every kWh of electricity used for servers (for details, see the EPA Report to Congress on Data Centers). That additional kWh is “overhead”, and to the extent that it can be reduced, data centers can save big on both energy costs and capital costs to construct these facilities. The service we really care about is computing, and so eliminating the waste associated with cooling the computers is all gravy.
Cloud computing providers have made big progress on reducing this waste, reaching overhead levels of 0.1 to 0.2 kWh per kWh of IT electricity use. For example, Google documents the PUE for their data centers here, and they boast an average overhead of 0.16 kWh/kWh of IT usage averaged across nine facilities. Centralized computing providers can achieve such savings because they have at least four advantages over the “in-house” facilities, as I’ve explained frequently (for one example, go here):
1) Diversity
2) Economies of scale
3) Flexibility
4) Ease of enabling structural change
These advantages mean that there will be ever more compelling economic reasons to using centralized computing facilities over in-house IT with each passing year. There still are good reasons for certain kinds of computing to be done in-house, but the powerful advantages of centralized computing will continue to create economic pressure to move to the cloud for many applications.
