How Google battles its increasing power consumption

Chicago (IL) - In a recent guest article for the CERN courier, Google vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle provided some insight of Google's challenges and strategy to limit overall power consumption of the firm's huge data center operations. According to Hoelzle, besides plain system power consumption, additional obstacles for data centers include cooling requirements, inefficiencies in power distribution and data centre layout.

Google is known for mastering a model to get the most performance out of a computer system for the least amount of money. Instead of running a few super computers, the company relies on thousands of fairly cheap entry-level systems with lots of system memory.

Looking at power inefficiencies, Hoelzle criticizes that the performance-per-watt ratio, a phrase that is being touted more and more by Intel but has been promoted especially by Transmeta in the past, "is stagnant." While performance increases, power consumption is rising as well and "operational costs of commercial data centres are almost directly proportional to how much power is consumed by the PCs," according to Hoelzle.

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