[lorenzo]

I found these interesting pieces about the rising energy costs of server farms. Soon, the electricity to run a server will cost more than the actual cost of that server! That's how dramatic the situation is.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Google warns of spiralling energy costs

It could soon cost more to power you server than buy it according to a Google engineer

A Google engineer has warned that if the performance per watt of today's computers doesn't improve, the electrical costs of running them could end up far greater than the initial hardware price tag.

That situation that wouldn't bode well for Google, which relies on thousands of its own servers.

"If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin," Luiz Andre Barroso, who previously designed processors for DEC, said in a September paper published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Queue. "The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiralling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet."

More here:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/server ... 045,00.htm

[SoothSayer]

Server farm energy consumption is not a major long term issue.

Either the heat can be recycled for other purposes, or the technology can be changed to use lower power chips & drives.

In fact, as electricity becomes more expensive, there could be major pressure on the chip & disk drive manufacturers to reduce power consumption. This will help all computers etc to become less power hungry.

(Software can also be made more efficient thus reducing the number of CPUs, memory chips and disk drives needed ... but sadly this is a technically difficult problem)

Overall this is one area where technology CAN save the day!

[lorenzo]

Sure, but the question is: can the "performance per watt" of the new servers be increased rapidly enough to off-set rising energy costs?

[mekrob]

I don't see though how the internet will decay or it's growth subside because the energy costs will be greater than the cost of the server. The fuel for just about anything is always more than the initial costs: cars, computers, printers, AC, refigerators, etc. As long as there is money and energy for the internet to operate and expand, it will expand. The higher energy costs will actually make it accelerate even more because people will have to work via the internet when costs are too high. Electricity is much cheaper than oil and is much more stable for most of the nation (nuclear and coal).

Despite that, I find that to be a very very good idea, lorenzo.

[birchm]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lorenzo', 'S')ure, but the question is: can the "performance per watt" of the new servers be increased rapidly enough to off-set rising energy costs?

[gg3]

Very nice idea. Put all the server farms in temperate climates where wind energy is plentiful. I'd invest if I had spare $$ to invest right now.

Though, the geeks who maintain those systems will need places to live and things to do other than stare at screens all day. So this in turn suggests creating hightech villages in these areas.

The only other downside issue is, the cost of energy has to get really really high before any company thinks of migrating its server farms to the middle of nowhere and setting up onsite wind power in the needed amounts.

In some cases it will also be possible to use microwave relay or even satellite link instead of fiber optic cable. This could be particularly useful for a proof-of-concept demonstration.

[FishAreBest]

The cost of power for servers and AC may be expensive, but it is not a patch on the cost of a high-bandwidth, low-latency, redundant network connection to it.