Imagine a life without the internet.
You can’t! That’s how inextricably enmeshed the internet is in our lives. Kids
learn to play “angry birds” on the PC before they learn to say “duh”, school
children hobnob on Facebook and many of us regularly browse, upload photos,
watch videos and do a dozen other things on the internet.
So on one side of the
internet is the user with his laptop, smartphones or iPad. So what’s on the
other side of the Internet and what is the Internet? The Internet is a
global system of interconnected computer
networks that uses the TCP/IP protocol. The Internet or more generally the internet
is network of networks made of hundreds of millions of computers.
During the early days the
internet was most probably used for document retrieval, email and browsing. But
with the passage of time the internet and the uses of the internet have assumed
gigantic proportions. Nowadays we use the internet to search billions of
documents, share photographs with our online community, blog and stream video.
So, while the early internet was populated with large computers to perform the
tasks, the computations of the internet of today require a substantially larger
infrastructure. The internet is now powered by datacenters. Datacenters contain
anywhere between 100s to 100,000s servers. A server is a more beefed up
computer that is designed for high performance sans a screen and a keyboard.
Datacenters contain servers stacked over one another on a rack.
These datacenters are capable
of handling thousands of simultaneous users and delivering results in split
second. In this age of exploding data and information overload where split
second responses and blazing throughputs are the need of the hour, datacenters
really fill the need. But there is a dark side to these data centers. The issue
is that these datacenters consume a lot of energy and are extremely power
hungry besides. In fact out of a 100% of utility power supplied to datacenter
only 6 – 12 % is used for actual computation. The rest of the power is either used
for air conditioning or is lost through power distribution.
In fact a recent article “Power,
pollution and the Internet” in the New York Times claims that “Worldwide,
the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly
equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.” Further the article states that “it is
estimated that Google’s data centers consume nearly 300 million watts and
Facebook’s about 60 million watts or 60 MW”
For e.g. It is claimed that Facebook
annually draws 509 million kilowatt hours of power for its data centers (see Estimate:
Facebook running 180,000 servers). This article further concludes “that the
social network is delivering 54.27 megawatts (MW) to servers” or approximately 60 MW to its datacenter. The other behemoths in this domain including
Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all have equally large or
larger data centers consuming similar amounts of energy. Recent guesstimates have placed Google’s server count at more than 1
million and consuming approximately
220 MW. Taking a look at the
power generation capacities of power plants in India
we can see that 60 MW is between to 20%-50% of the power generation capacity of
power plants while 220 MW is entire capacity of medium
sized power plants (see List of
power stations in India”)
One of the challenges that
these organizations face is the need to make the datacenter efficient. New techniques
are constantly being used in the ongoing battle to reduce energy consumption in
a data center. These tools are also designed to boost a data center's Power
Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft
compete to get to the lowest possible PUE measure in their newest data centers. The earlier datacenters used to average 2.0 PUE while advanced
data centers these days aim for lower ratings of the order of 1.22 or 1.16 or
lower.
In the early days of
datacenter technology the air-conditioning systems used to cool by brute force.
Later designs segregated the aisles as hot & cold aisle to improve efficiency.
Other technique use water as a coolant along with heat exchangers. A novel
technique was used by Intel recently in which servers were dipped in oil. While
Intel claimed that this improved the PUE rating there are questions about the
viability of this method considering the messiness of removing or inserting new
circuit board from the servers.
Datacenters are going to
proliferate in the coming days as information continues to explode. The hot new
technology “Cloud Computing” is nothing more that datacenters which uses
virtualization technique or the ability to run different OS on the hardware
improving server utilization.
Clearly the thrust of
technology in the days to come will be on identifying renewable sources of
energy and making datacenters more efficient.
Datacenters will become more
and more prevalent in the internet and technologies to make them efficient as
we move to a more data driven world
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