Microsoft, Google Battle Over Energy Efficiency

1sockchuck writes "Microsoft and Google have opened a new front in their battle for global domination: data center energy efficiency. Just weeks after Google published data on the extreme efficiency of its previously secret data centers, Microsoft says it has achieved similar results with shipping containers (despite Google's patent) packed with up to 2,500 servers. The geeky benchmark for the battle is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a green data-center metric advanced by The Green Grid. Microsoft says its containers tested at a PUE of 1.22, while Google reported an average PUE of 1.21 for its data centers, which apparently are also now using containers."

Re:Containers

[jlar]

Most businesses care about being green when it means spending less of the green ones.

Fat people...

[retech]

This is like two fat people drinking diet coke with their supersized double cheeseburger meal.

Telling Microsoft that Google are battling?

[Ragzouken]

Is there some unwritten rule that you can't use 'and' in a headline?

Re:Geography

[MichaelSmith]

Since it is mostly irrelevant where a data center physically is

Actually I think latency is a major issue for both Microsoft and Google as they chase the market for online applications.

Re:SWaP

[An dochasac]

Mod parent up. Sun has been using SWaP for several years now. If Space Wattage and Performance aren't a good starting point for IT efficiency measurement, what is? An air-cooled ENIAC in Iceland might have a good PUE but no one in their right mind would think this would make for an efficient modern data center.

"Green Grid" has no Green Organizations as Members

[giafly]

It seems to be a grouping of power-hogs who want to claim to be environmentally friendly. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it won't do some good, but until it get a few organizations like GreenPeace as members, and asks them to audit its standards, then nobody should take it too seriously.
The Green Grid: Members List [thegreengrid.org]

Re:Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno about that, I definitely prefer the titles in Firefox's Live Bookmark to be kept short. With the comma, I see "Google, Microsoft battling over energy effi...", while with the "and" I suppose I would see "Google and Microsoft battling over energy...".

Short headlines == good. (provided they are still understandable, and I can assure the GP that using commas instead of "and" has been commonplace for decades)

Re:Power usage effectiveness isn't the whole story

[pla]

OK so if you have a PUE of 1.2 then five-sixths of the input energy is used to power the computer equipment. But that doesn't say how energy efficient the machines themselves are. You could be running 150W Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors, or whatever, and still get a higher 'efficiency' than someone using Atom processors giving the same computational speed with lower power usage.

True - But it still means that 5/6ths of the power goes to adding computational resources rather than pure-waste overhead. Depending on the task, you might want as much horsepower as possible, or the highest reliability possible, or a massive storage or I/O node. But it doesn't really matter what you want in the box - lowering the overhead always counts as a win.