Greening the Cloud: Data Centers Slowly Embrace Efficiency

Cloud computing has widely been viewed as a phenomenon that will lead to a “greening” of the business sector by enabling companies to “go paperless,” but many of the facilities that provide the digital storage for these services are beginning to develop a reputation for being inefficient. The sheer volume of data centers being built throughout the world makes their cumulative impact massive. The need to keep staggering amounts of servers and equipment cool can lead to a very large carbon footprint. One of the largest factors in server design, just like in smartphones and laptops, is controlling heat. As more computer power is crammed into smaller and smaller devices, it becomes more difficult to create the right ventilation and fans to keep them from overheating. Servers are no different than these devices in that they are notorious for putting off massive amounts of heat. When you fill an entire room or building with them, it becomes very challenging to keep the equipment from overheating or literally melting.

In 2006, data centers consumed 1.5 percent of the power used in the United States. By 2010 the number grew to 2 percent. The number of data centers operated by the federal government grew from 432 in 1998 to 2,094 in 2010, leading the EPA to call for all data centers to reduce their energy consumption by 20 percent. Worldwide, the combination of government and private facilities consume the equivalent of 30 nuclear power plants.

The New York Times conducted a yearlong examination of data center use and found that most of the facilities run their equipment at full blast 24-7, regardless of demand, meaning data centers can waste up to 90 percent of the electricity they pull off the grid. Essentially this occurs because companies live in constant fear of having a system failure. Data centers leave the vast majority of their servers on and unused because the public relations cost of having a random surge in traffic shut down a major website like Facebook or a game server for World of Warcraft is much larger than the cost of simply running servers full blast all day every day. This means generators also must run at all hours because companies can’t risk having a freak power outage take down their servers, which can take hours to reboot if they lose power for even a second.

Some companies are beginning to find unique solutions to address the problem. Facebook, one of the larger contributors to the industry’s collective energy bill, with 60 million watts of energy consumed per year, is currently building a facility in Northern Sweden, because the naturally cool climate will cut down on the amount of cooling equipment needed.

A recent report by Pike Research, a Boulder, Colo., consulting firm, projected that $45 billion would be spent annually on making data centers more efficient and sustainable by 2016. The firm projected current spending on those types of projects to be around $17.5 billion this year. Data centers spread across the globe before most people even knew what they were, but the green building trend is now following close behind.