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[This interview originally appeared as a podcast on . You can listen to a podcast of this interview by downloading the interview in mp3 format, adding it to your iTunes, or subscribing to the GreenBiz Radio RSS feed.]
IT
managers are in a pickle these days: according to a recent report by
the Uptime Institute, nearly half of data center managers expect to hit
their maximum energy capacity in the next two years, even while IT
demand keeps growing. At the same time, energy costs are making
high-level computing an ever more costly core need for companies.
The result is a booming interest in energy-efficient data center
solutions that won't break the bank. Ken Brill, the executive director
of the Uptime Institute, spoke with GreenBiz Radio recently about some
of the surprisingly easy ways to boost performance and drop IT costs at
the same time, and what the Institute will unveil at its 2008 Symposium
later this month.
Matthew Wheeland: Ken, thanks for taking the time
to speak with us. I know we've heard repeatedly about the issues
companies are facing, in terms of their IT operations, the cost and
performance demands. Can you explain a little bit what the drivers are
behind this and what forms are these -- are these challenges taking?
Ken Brill: Well, I think everybody is somewhat familiar with
the increasing heat problems in the data center, trying to remove heat.
But I believe that that is just a symptom of the larger problem. And I
don't see very many people talking about what I see -- what I see is
the problem. Because I believe it's fundamentally economics, and the
economics come from when I first started in this field, it took about
50 years for the cost of electricity to cumulatively equal the cost of
the hardware.
And when you're in the environment in which I started, the cost of
facilities was insignificant, and by facilities I mean power and
cooling. The cost of facilities was insignificant relative to the
investment and the hardware. Well, today, depending on where you are in
the world, in high utility rate areas, like the northeast part of the
U.S. or in Europe or in Japan, the cost of the utilities, just to
support a single one-use server, will exceed the cost of the hardware
itself in less than three years.
So, you've gone from 50 years to three years in a relatively short
period of time. And the problem is that we all make assumptions. We
build mental models of optimizations, based on when we started, and so
many people are still carrying around in their heads this optimization
that the server, that the cost of electricity and power and cooling and
whatnot, is insignificant, relative to the cost of the hardware, and
that's not true anymore. The cost of the facility, when you include
power and cooling, the capital investment, depreciation, and just the
operating costs, that annual cost today is almost equal to the cost of
the hardware. Certainly, over three years, it exceeds the hardware.
MW: What's behind this? Is this an increase in performance, is it Moore's Law?
KB: It's the benefit of Moore's Law. I mean, what Moore's
Law has said is the number of transistors on a chip can double, he
originally said every 24 months, but it's actually worked out to about
every 18 months. And that has happened, but what we've kept -- we've
failed to keep an eye on the ball. Because while the chip performance
has been going up at about 3x every 24 months, the power efficiency has
only been going up at 2x every 24 months.
So, you have more chips, but the energy efficiency of the
transaction has not kept up with the rate at which the number of
transistors has gone up, so you have absolute energy consumption going
up. And this has been going on since 1965, and it has now come to
crisis proportions. The absolute energy consumption of IT is going p at
about a 10 percent per year rate, which, if you look at a national
economy, we're looking at in the next five years having to build 10
1,000-megawatt coal or nuclear fired power plants just to keep up with
the increase in electricity demand because of IT.
Reply
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