
Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image (2012) - edward
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html
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ucaetano
"Data centers are filled with servers, which are like bulked-up desktop
computers, minus screens and keyboards, that contain chips to process data."

"Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around
the clock, whatever the demand."

"Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the
industry."

Wow, this is bad.

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spacecowboy_lon
Vast amounts of energy lol has the reporter not been to a blast furnace or an
aluminum smelting plant or an actual energy intensive plant.

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cm2187
Why would backup generators be running outside of power cuts? Even if it is
just to test them, that should only be a minute from time to time.

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reustle
Because when the power does cut, how long is it going to take to get those
generators up and running? It's not like the whole place can run on a battery
backup in the meantime.

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rgbrenner
No.. the whole place DOES run on battery backup while the generators start. A
large data center will have multiple rows of these:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center#/media/File:Datace...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center#/media/File:Datacenter_Backup_Batteries.jpg)

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spacecowboy_lon
Done right the DC is always running off battery the backup gensets are there
to replace the mains power.

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geogriffin
This is an oversimplification, though I don't doubt that there is a lot of
infrastucture crud especially in large companies, which is a problem that
/should/ be fixed. But to measure utilization without any context is naive:

\- Most applications out there are probably not cpu-bound, so measuring cpu
utilization is worthless. Should categorize services as either cpu, disk,
network, or memory bound.

\- Even world-wide demand will vary a lot throughout daily and weekly cycles,
so over-provisioning is necessary for system stability

\- Need over-provisioning to handle peaks due to soccer games, earthquakes,
Christmas, etc.

All that said, I work at a company that (I get the impression maybe this is
unusual these days) has historically pushed the limits of per-machine
utilization through:

\- service isolation

\- minimal (pair-wise) redundancy (which is cheating, I know)

\- simple service architecture

\- leveraging mobile client processing power wherever possible

among other techniques, while using the latest and greatest bare metal boxes..
and we'd never hit anywhere near 100% cpu utilization. The most we've ever
driven even a a cpu-bound app (the front end) is around 60%, which is
dangerous, and we've suffered a couple outages as a result.

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yardie
"A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and
keyboard, that contains chips to process data."

Yes that is exactly what it is a bulked up desktop PC. Completely ignore these
highly specialised coprocessors sitting in the same box. They do nothing but
cost a fortune.

Besides the stupid article I can say there are some very old, inefficient
servers in the datacenter on my last visit. In our aisle I've walked past
dozens of yellowing beige boxes, Netburst era Compaqs, and old Cisco routers.
All putting out an incredible amount of heat.

Also this author knows very little about how a modern data centre runs. Just
because no one is using it doesn't mean the servers aren't working. I've timed
our backup and integrity checks to run during the few hours of the week when
usage is light.

Disneyland doesn't shutdown when the last guest leaves. Neither do
datacenters.

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Beltiras
I'm fairly comfortable with thinking about power consumption, thinking in
terms of work, power or energy. This journalist mixes those concepts in
confusing contexts. Also with data amounts. Can journalists please just use
powers of ten in these contexts? Small explanation up front then use 10^n.

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dekhn
This article is filled with misleading information and is written in a way to
mostly gather hits, rather than inform.

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FreeRad
2012

