The
New York Times published a superb report
yesterday (the first part of a series) on the massive, and massively wasteful, power
consumption that drives the Internet.
The article is notable not
only for its reporting but also for its appreciation of the underlying issues.
Specifically it emphasizes
that the Internet is not, as we'd like to believe, an entity that exists in some friction-less,
dream-like realm called "cyberspace" or "the cloud." In truth, the Internet isn't "virtual" at all: It runs on such Earth-bound
realities as diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, not to mention huge amounts of electricity and substantial amounts of pollution.
Here are some quotes:
Most data centers, by design, consume vast
amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents
show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity
around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90
percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.
“It’s staggering for most
people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size
of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data
centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”
Energy
efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The
Times, 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.
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.
At least a dozen major data centers have
been cited for violations of air quality regulations in Virginia
and Illinois
alone, according to state records. Amazon was cited with more than 24
violations over a three-year period in Northern Virginia,
including running some of its generators without a basic environmental permit.
Each year, chips in servers get faster, and
storage media get denser and cheaper, but the furious rate of data production
goes a notch higher.
With no sense that data is physical or that
storing it uses up space and energy, [Internet users] have developed the habit
of sending huge data files back and forth, like videos and mass e-mails with
photo attachments. Even the seemingly mundane actions like running an app to
find an Italian restaurant in Manhattan or a
taxi in Dallas
requires servers to be turned on and ready to process the information
instantaneously.
“If you tell somebody they can’t access
YouTube or download from Netflix, they’ll tell you it’s a God-given right,”
said Bruce Taylor, vice president of the Uptime Institute, a professional
organization for companies that use data centers.
A
crash or a slowdown could end a [data center manager's] career…A field born of
cleverness and audacity is now ruled by something else: fear of failure.
“When somebody says, ‘I’m going to store
something in the cloud, we don’t need disk drives anymore’ — the cloud is disk
drives,” Mr. Victora said. “We get them one way or another. We just don’t know
it.”
“That’s
what’s driving that massive growth — the end-user expectation of anything,
anytime, anywhere,” said David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief
of research at Gartner, the technology research firm. “We’re what’s causing the
problem.”
