Putting data centers on a low-energy diet (emphasis added):
A holistic approach to data centers could result in millions of dollars of savings and a far smaller carbon footprint for the ever-expanding universe of information technology.
That’s the promise of research conducted by Binghamton University colleagues Kanad Ghose, a professor of computer science, and Bahgat Sammakia, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the University’s New York State Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Packaging and Integration, or S3IP.
“The amount of energy we spend on running our data centers in the U.S. is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure,” Ghose said. “That doesn’t sound like a big number, but it’s enough to power a couple of good-sized cities for most of the year.”
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Most of the facilities use chilled water, and it takes some time to lower or raise the temperature of the water by 5 degrees. New York state alone spends close to $600 million on utility costs for running its data centers. Half goes to power the computers; the other half is spent on cooling. And utility costs continue to rise.
Most researchers focus on smart workload management when they talk about “green” data centers, but Ghose and Sammakia say that’s not enough. They’re looking for a comprehensive solution. That will mean finding a way to spread the workload across all the machines, planning in advance for the workload allocation and the cooling budget. Ultimately, it means exercising cooling activities and workload activities synergistically.
Just-in-time provisioning of IT resources and just-in-time cooling are the keys here, said Ghose, who expects to set up an experimental data center with Sammakia and other collaborators soon. Companies such as Emerson Network Power and IBM have already expressed interest in the project.
Notice the part I bolded. This is one of those “little” details that people who don’t work with data centers seldom know about, the high energy cost of cooling. It’s also why I keep saying that advances in making chips, hard drives, and other components more energy efficient is such a big deal. The energy they consume basically all winds up as heat in a data center, and every watt saved there is another watt that can potentially be saved in cooling. Combine those continual advances with better software and management practices, as detailed above, and we suddenly have a chance to save a non-trivial amount of elctricity and the ensuing environmental impact.
