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1. 

   Comment by Philip on 30 October 2009:

   Steve,
   You are correct – it is woeful and pretty amazing when you think about it.
   Equally amazing, in my mind, is the low level of awareness among data centre owners / operators, particularly corporates as opposed to colos and data centre companies. And the majority of data centres are owned by corporates.
   Amazing, too, is the low level of instrumentation and monitoring deployed right now in data centres to address your headline question – “Where does the power go?” Until you can see where the power is going within your data centre, to a fairly granular level and in near real-time, then you cannot start to manage it.
   The good news is that awareness is growing, a desire to do something about it is growing, and solutions are appearing.
   Philip
2. 

   Comment by Allan Clark on 2 November 2009:

   Isn’t it easier to force improvement by cost? Follow my tangent here, if you would…

   I’m unpopular because I tend to argue for countries such as USA to stop subsidizing oil products; their current £0.40/litre of petrol cannot last. I know that we’re accustomed to such prices, os we’re used to distant warehousing of supplies for logistical reasons among others. The thing is, it cannot last, and an easy way to bring about the proper change is to simply reduce subsidy or (gasp!) tax utilities.

   As a counter-point, an old co-worker argues that polarbears losing ice-cap requires them to evolve into better swimmers; I argue with him that it’s happening too fast for Darwin to catch up. The key point here is that influencing change based on environment has to be done at a pace that could be matched by polarbears or by entrepreneurs.

   The way this would appear in datacentres is by an increased cost of power, slowly over time, influencing more consideration of power as a more significant aspect of DC choice. That consideration should influence more creative ideas: although we’re not going to get back that inefficiency at generation (and remember, the petrol engine hovers at 17%-19% efficiency), we may save in distribution (slightly) and use kooky ideas such as geological/geographical aspects for cooling. Nuke plants near rivers are not just for the scenery; heat-exchangers to aquifers might become a consideration.

   Much as it may come off as a Granola-inspired Green-hallucination, the object of that tangent is to express that price and taxation can influence the desired behavior, if leveraged over sufficient time for the reaction/players to keep up. That price change will eventually be passed on to consumers, but remaining competitive in the marketplace means keeping overhead low and net impact to consumers low.

3. Pingback by Where does the power go? « Enterprise Strategy Group on 23 December 2009:

   [...] From the coal or oil delivered to the power station all the way through to the energy that drives our business applications the efficiency story is woeful. Read the entire blog entry here >> [...]

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