Refusing to be an accomplice to global warming. Energy saving in data center

"Tenkine Server channel October 24" to talk about global warming, everyone will think of the greenhouse effect, the http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/33241.html of the greenhouse Effect "> the culprit-carbon dioxide." If the data center also "contributes" to global warming, it is estimated that many people will think it is alarmist. Yes, the massive increase in carbon dioxide comes from the burning of all kinds of fossil fuels, and the data centers are run by electricity, and how did the data center become an accomplice to global warming?

Data center: An accomplice to global warming?

It is estimated that the world's Internet Data Center power may reach 30 billion watts a year, equivalent to 30 power plants. From this we will think of the world's first computer "ENIAC", it is said that the computer in the operation of the whole town lights will be darkened, this shows that the power consumption of high-performance computers in the early days of computer research has emerged. A high-end data center uses electricity equivalent to 30 to 40 high-density residential buildings, so a high annual electricity bill is the main cost of the data center. So some of the big internet companies ' data centers will build their own power stations to keep the data center running. According to the Waitan Pictorial report, "Greenpeace's Hong Kong office recently released a black cloud report that points to Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, the world's three biggest technology giants, accusing them of" using coal to support the operation of data centers and developing their own cloud technology at the expense of climate damage ".

A large data center with its own firepower power stations and coal fields (supposedly apples)

Apple has focused on promoting icloud technology in recent years, allowing data to be automatically stored in different products, including the iphone, IPad and ipod. To that end, Apple is aggressively expanding and building data centers, including at least $1 billion trillion in one of the world's largest idatacenter in North Carolina. In addition, Apple has just announced the construction of another data center in Oregon State's Prineville. According to research, two data centers are mainly coal-fired power, and Microsoft intends to vigorously develop cloud business, plans to build a data center in Virginia State, is said to be highly likely to be coal-fired power. The big shopping site, Amazon, has at least 8 major data centers in the Virginia State. Local environmental authorities found that Amazon, without filing with the authorities, illegally used large diesel generators, affecting the local air quality, was sentenced to 24 violations, a fine of nearly 300,000 U.S. dollars. This shows that the large data centers of Internet companies have indeed become accomplices in global warming.

24x7 devices are one of the main sources of power consumption in the data center

Of course, it is not realistic for step to ban its own power stations, which are large data centers in the Internet, and it is impossible for us to shut down data centers for the age of the Internet. Therefore, how to achieve the data center of Energy Saving and emission reduction is the basic way to reduce the burning of fossil fuel of own power station. Large data center mainly reflects the power consumption in two aspects, one is the server, storage and other equipment, because regardless of user demand, the major web site data centers are all all-weather operation, so brought a huge power consumption. Second, in order to stabilize the server in the data center, the data center has to increase the size and power of the cooling system of the engine room, and the air-conditioning equipment and the blower are also all-weather operation, which is the second reason that the data center consumes too much electricity.

Green Data Center is the direction of future data center development

In order to reduce the power consumption of the server and other equipment, the hardware manufacturers are also improving the chip manufacturing process, and strive to achieve high performance while reducing the power consumption of the product. In addition, the development of cloud servers, reducing the number of physical servers is also a good choice to reduce the energy consumption of the data center. And the most effective way is to the engine room of the cooling system for transformation and innovation. The traditional cooling mode is still mainly air conditioning, if the use of other cooling methods, such as water-cooled, because the heat exchange efficiency is very high, so can be large-scale cancellation of the number of refrigeration air-conditioning, because the number of pumps is very small, and the power consumption is much lower. But this will require a large-scale transformation of the existing computer room, while the server and other equipment cooling devices also need to redesign, the cost of natural relatively high. In addition, now internationally also respected the concept of green data center, compared to the traditional data center, the biggest advantage of the green data center is to be able to decide whether to shut down refrigeration air-conditioning according to the different seasons, for example, in the northern winter, the outdoor cold air into the engine room is an excellent cooling way, This will reduce the utilization rate of air conditioners by at least one-third. But the green data center generally in the temperate zone effect is more obvious. Fortunately some data centers have noticed this, and some data centers are choosing to build and migrate to temperate regions.

Facebook's own solar power stations deserve to be admired

To prevent carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, green energy, such as wind, solar, hydro and tidal power, can be considered for the power plants of large data centers. But these have made a high demand for the location of the data center, and the funds needed to be invested are very high. Thus, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from data center development is a long way off.