Power Costs Could Overtake Server Costs

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Very interesting article on News.com, an engineer from Google has stated that if the performance per watt of today’s server doesn’t get any better, then power costs to run the server will end up costing more than the server.

I may be out of the loop, as I don’t have anything to do with paying the bills at my day job, but I’ll have to admit, I had never even considered this as a problem. Wow.

“If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin,” Luiz Andre Barroso, who previously designed processors for Digital Equipment Corp., said in a September paper published in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Queue. “The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet.”

If server power consumption grows 20 percent per year, the four-year cost of a server’s electricity bill will be larger than the $3,000 initial price of a typical low-end server with x86 processors. Google’s data center is populated chiefly with such machines. But if power consumption grows at 50 percent per year, “power costs by the end of the decade would dwarf server prices,” even without power increasing beyond its current 9 cents per kilowatt-hour cost, Barroso said. Source: News.com

We Say: Personally, I would like to see them go after the electric companies and try to get them to reduce prices, help us all out in the long run, he he, but I don’t see that happening. Maybe the government could set a top dollar amount on the cents per kilowatt-hour cost. Anyway, I hope Google let’s us know which machine they standardize on, as you know it will be the best one available as far as power consumption goes.