For many years, when we consider buying computers, we never thought about how much electricity it uses. Primarily because the electricity consumption is part of another expense that is not necessarily separately monitored. In all of the last 20 years that I talked to many people about buying computers, electricity expenses almost never was discussed.
It was not significant – or we thought it was not significant. It was similar to five years ago when oil was only less than a third of the price now. People still think that if they buy Ford Expeditions, or huge SUVs they will have more gasoline consumption, but it was something that was not significant, and something they could afford.
The last three years, with oil hovering at the 60 to 70 dollar range per barrel, and with computers getting more and more powerful, people suddenly started to note that their electric bill is really something they should take a second look at, much the same way that people are generally thinking twice before buying huge vehicles.
It is primarily due that computers nowadays are much more powerful – and the reason for its being powerful is that processors nowadays pack hundreds of millions of transistors. It also generates lots of heat. Consider this – computers nowadays probably would eat up twice or three times as much electricity as the same computers ten years ago. But there is more – they also generate two or three times as much heat – something you need additional air conditioning to offset. So computers nowadays may eat up four or five times more electricity.
There was a time when you can just throw your servers in a corner and it would run. Now, if you have several servers running 24 hours, many of them will require cooling or 24 hours airconditioning to continue functioning properly.
An IDC report says that currently for every dollar that is being spent to buy computer hardware, 50 cents is spent annually for the energy to power and cool that hardware. And it gets even worse – as computers get more powerful, they estimated that by 2011, every dollar you spend on computer hardware will need a corresponding 71 cents that goes for energy costs.
These statistics tell us one thing – it should be noted that you are now going to spend more in powering and cooling these computers over a three year period than what you spend in buying these computers.
In fact, a study said that a 10,000 square foot data center can consume as much electricity as 8,000 60 watt lightbulbs. That is the amount of electricity that is equivalent to over a million dollars a year, and is probably six to ten times the power needed to operate a typical office building.
There are starting to be new architectures developed to address this — much like hybrid cars (those combining use of gas and electricity) are starting to be introduced to address this.
Processor manufacturers are starting to focus on doing dual or multicore processors as a way to increase the power of the computers. They are also introducing more power efficient models like automatically powering the processors down when in idle mode. Server manufacturers are introducing new architectures like blade servers which promises to reduce electricity consumption by as much as 20 to 30 percent through better design that are easier to cool. Many manufacturers are starting to introduce hardware and software virtualization that allows people to consolidate tasks that hopefully would allow them to make more efficient use of servers and therefore need less servers. The term virtualization is a big term nowadays, and you will be hearing much more about it in the coming days.
But what is important to us is to start evaluating our needs. A school MIS person was proud of the fact that his school uses about 50 servers ( many of them 4 to 10 years old) and he was saving a lot for the schools for continuing to use these old servers. What he did not compute was that it costs the school over a fortune every month to power, cool and maintain those servers. Upon careful study, we found out that using more powerful servers and virtualization, he may replace the 50 aging servers to less than 5.
Saving money has many faces and it is important that we understand in order not to be penny wise and pound foolish.
Wilson Ng keeps a blog of his articles in www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife