Serving Up Energy Efficiency, Market-Style

[jpak]

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005325.html

A rather cool thing has been happening lately in the hot world of computer server farms: product manufacturers are serving up dramatic improvements in energy efficiency -- with scarcely an activist, regulator, or other pressure group to claim credit for it.

Except for customers, that is.

The problem, for the uninitiated, is that server farms -- those massive banks of computers that manage traffic for Web sites, email hosts, and company networks, among others -- are ravenous energy consumers. There are at least nine million servers in the U.S., operating 24/7, providing the bandwidth that allows businesses, individuals, and governments to store and serve up every type of data and media imaginable, from iTunes to IRS forms.

Servers are growing at an astonishing rate -- not just in numbers, but in speed, demanding ever-greater amounts of power. According to the research firm Gartner, there has been a significant increase in the deployment of high-density servers over the past twelve months, leading to huge power and cooling challenges for data centers. The energy needed for a rack of these high-density servers can be between 10 and 15 times higher than for a traditional server environment.

<more>