A data center in Ashburn, Va., sits behind the Dominion Virginia Power substation that serves it. Worldwide, such centers use the rough equivalent of the output of 30 nuclear power plants. (Brendan Smialowski, The New York Times)
SANTA CLARA, Calif.?? Each day in the U.S., stupendous amounts of data are set in motion as people download movies on iTunes, check credit-card balances on Visa's website, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online. Each one of the tens of thousands of data centers that exist to support the explosion of digital information can use enough energy to power a medium-size town, according to one expert. They also waste vast amounts of electricity, and many have been cited for violating clean-air regulations, 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 in a year-long examination.
To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean-air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government's Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area's top stationary diesel polluters.
Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the U.S. account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.
"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."
Efficiency varies
Energy efficiency varies from company to company. At the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. 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.
A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to process data. The study sampled about 20,000 servers in about 70 large data centers spanning the commercial gamut: drug companies, military contractors, banks, media companies and government agencies.
"This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to say mea culpa," said a senior industry executive who asked not to be identified to protect his company's reputation. "If we were a manufacturing industry, we'd be out of business straightaway."
These physical realities of data are far from the mythology of the Internet: where lives are lived in the "virtual" world and all manner of memory is stored in "the cloud."
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.
Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries ? many of them similar to automobile batteries ? to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers.
"It's a waste," said Dennis Symanski, a senior researcher at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry group. "It's too many insurance policies."
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.
A few companies say they are using extensively re-engineered software and cooling systems to decrease wasted power. Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware. Still, according to recent disclosures, Google's data centers consume nearly 300 million watts and Facebook's about 60 million watts.
Resistance to change
Many of these solutions are readily available, but in a risk-averse industry, most companies have been reluctant to make wholesale change, according to industry experts.
Improving, or even assessing, the field is complicated by the secretive nature of an industry largely built around accessing other people's personal data.
For security reasons, companies typically do not even reveal the locations of their data centers, which are housed in anonymous buildings and vigilantly protected. Companies also guard their technology for competitive reasons, said Michael Manos, a longtime industry executive.
"All of those things play into each other to foster this closed, members-only kind of group," he said.
That secrecy often extends to energy use. To further complicate any assessment, no single government agency has the authority to track the industry. In fact, the federal government was unable to determine how much energy its own data centers consume, according to officials involved in a survey completed last year.
The survey did discover that the number of federal data centers grew from 432 in 1998 to 2,094 in 2010.
Some analysts warn that as the amount of data and energy use continue to rise, companies that do not alter their practices could eventually face a shake-up in an industry that has been prone to major upheavals, including the bursting of the first Internet bubble in the late 1990s.
"It's just not sustainable," said Mark Bramfitt, a former utility executive who now consults for the power and information technology industries. "They're going to hit a brick wall."
Decade of growth
Jeremy Burton, an expert in data storage, said that when he worked at a computer technology company 10 years ago, the most data-intensive customer he dealt with had about 50,000 gigabytes in its entire database. (Data storage is measured in bytes. The letter N, for example, takes 1 byte to store. A gigabyte is 1 billion bytes of information.)
Today, roughly 1 million gigabytes are processed and stored in a data center during the creation of a single 3D animated movie, said Burton, now at EMC, a company focused on the management and storage of data.
Just one of the company's clients, the New York Stock Exchange, produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years, he added.
EMC and International Data Corp. together estimated that more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information were created globally last year.
"It is absolutely a race between our ability to create data and our ability to store and manage data," Burton said.
Three-quarters of that data, EMC estimated, was created by ordinary consumers.
With no sense that data is physical or that storing it uses up space and energy, those consumers 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.
The complexity of a basic transaction is a mystery to most users: Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could involve a trip through hundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits and multiple data centers before the e-mail arrives across the street.
"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.
To support all that digital activity, there are now more than 3 million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to figures from International Data Corp.
amazonian amounts
In Manassas, Va., the retailing colossus Amazon runs servers for its cloud amid a truck depot, a defunct grain elevator, a lumberyard and junk-strewn lots where machines compress loads of trash for recycling. Air ducts big enough to accommodate industrial cooling systems sprout along the rooftops. Huge diesel generators sit in rows around the outside.
The Manassas sites are among at least eight major data centers Amazon operates in northern Virginia, according to records of Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality.The department is on familiar terms with Amazon. As a result of four inspections beginning in October 2010, the company was told it would be fined $554,476 by the agency for installing and repeatedly running diesel generators without obtaining standard environmental permits required to operate in Virginia. Even if there are no blackouts, backup generators still emit exhaust because they must be regularly tested.After months of negotiations, the penalty was reduced to $261,638. In a "degree of culpability" judgment, all 24 violations were given the ranking "high."
Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, agreed that the company "did not get the proper permits" before the generators were turned on."All of these generators were all subsequently permitted and approved," Herdener said.
The New York Times
Source: http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_21610630/data-centers-waste-vaste-amounts-energy?source=rss
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