Datacentres curb their appetite for power

Datacentres across the USA are not consuming as much power as the US Environmental Protection Agency had feared, according to a new report.

Instead of doubling as predicted, electricity consumed by datacentres across the US grew by 36 percent from 2005 to 2010, Jonathan Koomey, an analyst and Stanford University professor, said in a report released on Monday.

The slowing in the rise of power consumption was less than expected because of "the 2008 financial crisis, the associated economic slowdown, and further improvements in [server] virtualisation," he said.

Worldwide, datacentre power usage climbed by 56 percent in the past five years, rather than doubling as Koomey had expected.

The US results of the study jar with predictions put forth in an influential 2007 report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The report [PDF] anticipated that datacentre energy use across the USA would increase by 100 percent from 2007 to 2010, if technology followed established efficiency trends.

The EPA expected US-based datacentres would use around 2.5 percent of the country’s electricity supply in 2011. However, Koomey found they used between 1.7 percent and 2.2 percent in 2010, and he did not expect them to climb dramatically throughout 2011.

Google approaches a million servers

Koomey also revealed that Google's datacentres hold around 900,000 servers. However, because Google designs its own servers with onboard batteries and a variety of other efficiency-optimising tweaks, its overall energy use is not that high, he said. Overall, Google consumes less than one percent of the electricity used by datacentres worldwide.

"This result is in part a function of the higher infrastructure efficiency of Google's facilities compared to in-house datacentres," Koomey wrote. "[This] is consistent with efficiencies of other cloud-computing installations, but it also reflects lower electricity use per server for Google’s highly optimised servers."