Digital Age

Southie · October 20, 2012, 2:01pm

Re: Digital Age

Superb article. Highly informative. Thank you!

Here is a article in nytimes that is very informative on the cost of the digital age. Nothing is as free as it sounds. But, I don’t know how this compares to the cost of traditional print industry.

The article is about datacenters. I had a chance to visit a datacenter and the guy giving me the tour said the same thing.

Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - The New York Times

A data center or computer centre (also datacenter) is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices. Large data centers are industrial scale operations using as much electricity as a small townand sometimes are a significant source of air pollution in the form of diesel exhaust.

Some major points from the first page of the article.
A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.
Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner
Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. This is because they need to have backup servers running all the time in case of failure of the mains servers
The consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.
To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show    In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.
**Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.**
“A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”
“This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to say mea culpa,” said a senior industry executive who asked not to be identified to protect his company’s reputation. “If we were a manufacturing industry, we’d be out of business straightaway.”
These physical realities of data are far from the mythology of the Internet: where lives are lived in the “virtual” world and all manner of memory is stored in “the cloud.”
The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation.