By Steve Alten
I’m fortunate to live in the Pacific Northwest, where the electricity rates are among the lowest in the nation. My family never turns off our six home computers. We have computers for every family member’s desk, one in the kitchen and we have three PC media centers hooked up to big screen TVs. We have grown so attached of our beloved PCs and Macs that we really wouldn’t choose to ever live without them. However, when I got my electricity bill this month, I couldn’t help but reminisce that it was higher than the monthly payment for the very first new car I bought! I can ask the family to turn lights off when they’re not using them, or to stop using the oven and eat out more, but I can’t really expect them to cut back on the deep love affair with their computer. Corporate and institutional users aren’t very different from my family.
I was the only one who truly liked my first car
The Baltimore Sun reported last year that the U.S. National Security Agency couldn’t get enough power for their massive compute facility, despite being hooked up to two primary power grids. The NSA has had to delay the delivery of some new equipment, because its power infrastructure couldn’t cope with the current hardware and even had to have rolling brownouts, shutting some offices for up to half a day. I know I won’t sleep when it’s a hot day in Maryland, even though my house has central air conditioning!
NSA facility at Fort Meade, Maryland
Michael Bell, Research VP of Gartner Group recently said: “Organizations are increasingly deploying more computing power, but, by 2008, 50 percent of current data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment.” If you have the luxury of moving, you could follow in Google , Yahoo and Microsoft’s footsteps and build a data center next to an underutilized power station away from any major business centers. Property can be very affordable if you’re willing to relocate several hours away from a city, airport or StarbucksTM. Somehow I don’t think the average CEO of BigCo would like the idea of moving, even if parking was free.
The Dalles, Oregon, next to a hydro-electric generation dam is the site of Google’s latest data center
A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report to Congress last summer stated that in 2006 the nation’s servers consumed 7.7 gigawatts of energy and that will grow to 12 gigawatts at a cost of $7.4B by 2011. Even with current green technology innovation trends, this increase will require ten new power generation plants! CIO magazine predicts power costs will increase to as much as 22 times more than the cost of the server hardware within the next four years. Although “green” is usually thought as saving the planet, green also is the color of money in the U.S. and data center energy costs certainly require an unprecedented amount of green paper to keep running.
This famous 1985 DeLorean’s flux capacitor had trouble locating the required 1.2 gigawatts to time travel
When we look at the major consumers of power in a data center, it’s no surprise that servers and their cooling is half the load, but a close second is the communication switch that connects them together. For example, a rack of 32 1U servers will typically consume about 15kW of electricity and the industry leading 10GbE Ethernet switch will consume an incremental 6kW. To improve reliability, many data centers normally choose to add a second redundant switch for a total of 12kW. Every watt of heat generated requires .8 to 1.4W of energy to remove it. Using an average HVAC cooling factor, a redundant switch for 32 servers can consume as much as 24kW of power.
How much is 24kW of power? If one was to mathematically convert electrical power to horsepower, it is equivalent to a 32HP engine continuously running at full throttle. The equivalent of an old car powering a switch can’t be very good for the environment! In New York City, $0.22 per kW hour can quickly add up to big money and at the end of the year, you will have spent $46,252 on electricity just for the switch.
The industry leading switch uses as much energy as a 32HP gasoline engine
Lightfleet offers an elegant and innovative solution to the high power usage problem of typical data center switches by using broadcast light instead of cables to communicate. If Lightfleet’s DBOI is used to connect a cluster of computers, it can greatly exceed the performance of an old fashioned switch while using less power.
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I’m really excited to be part of the Lightfleet team that will bring this technology to the market this year. Despite my family’s growing thirst for digital data, I don’t feel I run a data center at home quite yet. I do however consider myself a worthy charity (501C designation pending) and have already placed an order for a smart fortwoTM car. I have my order confirmation number proudly posted on my office wall in anticipation of a grateful customer rewarding me for helping avert global warming by building something that is so overwhelmingly green.
You can send your responses to me: salten (at) lightfleet.com.