Data Centers Push Back On US Efficiency Rules

alphadogg writes "Data center executives from Google and other large companies are pushing back against new efficiency requirements proposed by a prominent standards group, saying they are too 'prescriptive' and don't leave them room to innovate. 'This standard defines the energy efficiency for most types of buildings in America and is often incorporated into building codes across the country,' Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president for operations, wrote in a post on the Google blog. Data centers are among the fastest-growing users of energy, and setting efficiency standards for them is a welcome step, he said. But he called the requirements 'too prescriptive.' Instead of setting efficiency targets and letting engineers decide how they can best meet them, the amendments specify types of cooling systems that companies should use."

Re:It's not the government's business...

[Anonymous Coward]

The car analogy is relevant to a point.

However, computers and data centers are not cars. Technologies that artificially restrict things may be very harmful in the long run. For example, virtualization. Each physical machine is using more energy because of the added load of VMs, but because one physical box has replaced 1+ hardware machines with a VM, this means that a machine that is consuming 1000 watts of electricity is better than two running at 750. If someone places some arbitrary requirement that machines cannot use over 800 watts, then a server room will be forced to get more machines of a lesser wattage.

Or perhaps take SAN storage. As hard disks get denser and denser, they tend to put out more heat and use more energy. However, (and this is not factoring in RAID or other reasons to use multiple disks), the increased capacities more than make up for the increased heat. So, a 2TB drive may store more, but it replaces a number of smaller capacity drives that might use less energy singly, but combined, use more than the one drive. (Of course to reiterate, this is an example that factors out needs for multiple drives such as striping, redundancy and other stuff.)

Ultimately, energy efficiency is needed, but people can't just say that a 1U system can only take "X" amount of watts, similar to how cars are specced with MPG.

What might help efficiency are asymmetrical cores. If a database server is used 9-5, it could have a couple Intel Atom spec CPUs on it, as well as a number of normal CPUs. This way, when the CPU usage is so low that the low power Atom cores can completely deal with the machine's overhead, the other cores can be shut down when everyone heads out for Miller time.

Auto headlamps.

[TechwoIf]

The same thing was done in the past. Only 6 inch round headlamps was allowed in cars manufactured and sold in America. It was the best back then, but what happen in the following years is that it stop innovation all together in America and Europe started to make better headlamps. Years ago was the law was repealed and non 6 inch headlamps was allowed to be installed on autos. Took years for America to catch up.

Economizers not always usable

[Skapare]

These economizers that are being referenced are not always usable. They effectively circulate outside air into the data center. When the outside air is too hot, they can't be used. Also, when the outside air has too many pollutants, they can't be used. The cost of having them makes little sense when their usability is low. Other systems could make better use of the investment.

This is definitely a case where goals, not methods, should be prescribed.

Re:It's not the government's business...

[TheRaven64]

We did in Europe, which followed the suggestion that the grandparent made: adding taxes to cover externalities. Fuel taxes on this side of the pond mean that petrol is 2-4 times as expensive as in the USA (depending on the country), and so there is a strong incentive for consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars. A similar efficiency saving will save the customer significantly more over the lifetime of the vehicle in Europe than in the USA so there's more market pressure to provide efficient cars.