

Google power: 900,000 servers, uses 0.01% of world’s electricity - 11031a
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/google-runs-900000-servers-uses-0-01-of-worlds-electricity-2011081/

======
fourspace
Articles like this are hilarious, especially for those of us that helped
design, build and manage Google's datacenters at one point or another.

First, the number of servers may be impressive, but anyone that's done large
scale computing can quickly point out that it's one of the least important
measures. Much more important are how they are connected, the performance and
ease of use of the distributed software infrastructure, resource utilization
per machine, etc.

Second, these numbers are almost always wrong.

~~~
mitchty
I just like the power requirement %. Knowing how much power some servers put
out and their overall utilization would be more impressive stat-wise to me.
I've seen far too many systems sit with a sub 1 load average that sucked up
way too many watts of power needlessly.

But you're 100% right about what matters is the overall application and its
performance. The devil is in the details. At my job we only have 5ish k linux
boxes, so an order of magnitude smaller. But still fun. Except the z-series
nodes. /shudder

------
sorbus
The key sentence from this article: "Realistically though, this is just a best
_guess_ made by Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey."

------
stretchwithme
I wonder how many unnecessary car trips Google prevents. It certainly spares
me from going to the library for an hour searching for a single fact.

Exercises like these seldom take your most valuable resource into account.
Your time.

------
JacobIrwin
Tagline (Spin): Google Uses .01% of the World's Electricity to Directly Impact
50% of the World's Population

------
erikpukinskis
It must be cool to apply a performance patch that lets you decommission
thousands of servers.

~~~
lukesandberg
Realistically what happens is that you apply a performance patch that delays
the purchase of the next thousand servers.

~~~
erikpukinskis
They're still decommissioned for the current project. Or whatever the opposite
of requisition is. I think decommission is right.

------
nextparadigms
Another stat is that they use less than 1% of the energy of all datacenters on
Earth. That's pretty impressive for _the_ Internet company.

------
ck2
How on earth do you manage nearly a million server?

I can barely deal with a few of them. Always something going on.

I guess it helps theirs are all identical images?

------
wmf
Yeah, we had this discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832164>

------
ristretto
Actually I thought "that is too much", given that electricity is consumed
inefficiently in the developed world by individuals, while Google has the
ability to do massive optimization.

------
tonfa
Why not link to the original? blog: <http://www.koomey.com/post/8323374335>
article:
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/01/repor...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/01/report-
google-uses-about-900000-servers/) nyt:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/technology/data-centers-
us...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/technology/data-centers-using-less-
power-than-forecast-report-says.html?_r=1)

