It's no secret that access to endless energy is the lifeblood of data centers. At the same time, energy costs vary widely depending on location. What if data centers could use that price variability to their advantage? That's the question asked by researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and networking company Akamai. According to the researchers, Internet businesses that swallow up energy (think Google and Microsoft) could save millions of dollars by using an Internet-routing algorithm that moves data to wherever electricity costs are lowest at a particular time.
There are many reasons for price variability--changes in supply, time of day, consumer demand, and fuel prices. By taking into account the cost of rerouting information versus the potential savings from lowered energy costs, researchers found that companies could potentially cut energy consumption by 40%. With data center usage expected to quadruple in the next decade, these findings could have positive implications for the continued growth of data center-reliant organizations. And as companies like Apple, which recently announced that it is building one of the world's largest data centers in North Carolina, become more invested in energy-intensive cloud computing initiatives, cost concerns are only going to become more common,
There are some caveats to the energy-routing system. It cuts costs, but not necessarily overall energy use or pollution. And as Jonathan Koomey, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist, explains "The trick is to be able to control these systems well enough and to create controls that are cheap enough to be able to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity available from differential electricity prices, without affecting reliability or latency".
We don't have yet have this control, but in the meantime data centers have a number of other options to cut energy use and potential costs. IBM, for example, is working on a super-energy efficient data center that will use 50% less energy than existing data centers. And yes, that's without sending data all over the place in the hopes of cutting costs.
[Via MIT Technology Review]
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Recent Comments | 4 Total
August 19, 2009 at 6:13am by Todd Szahun
Great article! As it points out, while this cuts cost, it does not cut energy consumption. One of the best efforts to cut IT-related energy consumption is being undertaken by a collaboration between Schneider Electric (building automation), Verdiem (PC Power Management), and SolarWinds (Network Management), and Cisco. The program, called Cisco EnergyWise, aims to monitor and control energy consumption down to the IP level. By applying the monitoring and control capabilities of the intelligent building management system to datacenter hardware and network devices, companies stand to achieve energy savings that have never before been achieved. An exciting endeavor and a great collaborative effort!
August 19, 2009 at 9:59am by Alan Kirschbaum
While the same amount of electricity is being used, its being used in another jurisdiction that is likely, given the lower price, not at peak demand. The jurisdiction that is rerouting its computer activity could benefit from lowering its peak demand, reducing the need to import electricity (very expensive), or fire up other power plants (likely coal). This could also reduce the need to build new plants to meet increasing peak demand.
August 19, 2009 at 10:01am by Alan Kirschbaum
While the same amount of electricity is being used, its being used in another jurisdiction that is likely, given the lower price, not at peak demand. The jurisdiction that is rerouting its computer activity could benefit from lowering its peak demand, reducing the need to import electricity (very expensive), or fire up other power plants (likely coal). This could also reduce the need to build new plants to meet increasing peak demand.
November 20, 2009 at 8:35am by Jim pedd
There are several worth-reading blogs and articles floating around the blogosphere this week focused on the concept of “energy-aware” Internet routing, or the concept that someone who runs power-hungry data centers could set up algorithms that move the data around to be processed where it is most cost-effective from a power standpoint.
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