On Oct 1, 2008, at 4:18 PM, Jon Lewis wrote:
On Wed, 1 Oct 2008, Tuc at T-B-O-H.NET wrote:
OK, green hat off. :) Seriously, I doubt GOOG isn't seeing serious savings from this over time. If they weren't why would they do it?
They seem to be very environment focused, so I'm sure doing anything that isn't is subject to scrutiny from the rest of the industry.
Personal 747, cough, cough...
I'd bet at their scale, they're saving tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on their data center power bills by optimizing power efficiency.
I think you're being overly conservative. ~500,000 computers. (cough; estimate as of 2006) [1] ~150W per computer (google's are supposedly pretty efficient, this number may be high). that's about 75 megawatts. = 657,000,000 kWh/year (if they're all turned on all the time, which recent articles suggest is probably the case [2]). $65M per year @ $0.10 per kWh. (possibly an over-estimate with datacenters located near hydropower dams). If the average datacenter has a PUE of ~1.9 and google's are at 1.2, that suggests that they're saving something on the order of $10-20M per year with power efficiency efforts. Over a million bucks per month. Not bad. This seems to mesh with the non-scientific, vague claim in the PUE document that "we save hundreds of millions of kWhs of electricity" and "cut our operating expenses by tens of millions of dollars." There's serious money in improving server efficiency. Green feathers in the cap, green in the hand... -Dave [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/14search.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5088&en=c96a72bbc5f90a47&ex=1307937600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9975495-54.html