[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('DDJ', 'T')hat much idle hardware may not have been desirable, but it became indefensible when large data centers collided with another economic reality—the power company. It turns out that electrical power is now the largest expense for many data centers, outstripping even the amortized cost of the server hardware. The total electrical load for large-scale centers is in the multimegawatt range, with essentially all of that power becoming heat that must be removed by chilled-air handlers. In fact, access to power and cooling may limit the number of racks a data center can reload with next-hardware generation.

Here's a useful number: With electricity priced at $0.12 per kilowatt-hour, an always-on device dissipating 1 W costs $1 per year. That wall-wart cell-phone charger that you leave plugged in under your desk costs five bucks a year and your fancy LCD panel burns eight bucks a year when it's turned off. Run your own numbers and see, but you're spending closer to a buck a watt a year than you might think.

[green_achers]

Server heat cogen plant, anyone?

[max_power29]

This is good news and makes me happy because it will make an orwellian, big brother type fascism very expensive and in the future, impossible to maintain.

[SolarDave]

Some Data Centers have figured it out...

SolarHost

Yes, they still use electricity, and I'm sure they would appreciate more efficient computers (I have spoken to them, and what they fear the most is the "server reboot" that causes the drives to spin up - that is the highest draw for servers), but they are "immune" to increasing power costs. As computing efficiency increases - it's all good news to them.

[Concerned]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SolarDave', 'S')ome Data Centers have figured it out...

SolarHost

Yes, they still use electricity, and I'm sure they would appreciate more efficient computers (I have spoken to them, and what they fear the most is the "server reboot" that causes the drives to spin up - that is the highest draw for servers), but they are "immune" to increasing power costs. As computing efficiency increases - it's all good news to them.

[dbuckley]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('green_achers', 'S')erver heat cogen plant, anyone?

[sch_peakoiler]

Speaking of data centers led me to this one thought:

Does anybody have an info on the electricity consumption of the internet? Not including millions of user computers, just the approximate consumption of the internet infrastructure like hosting servers, backbone servers, dns servers, data transmitting lines and so on??