On Oct 1, 2008, at 5:44 PM, Deepak Jain wrote:
I am going to attempt to determine our PUE, using the methodology
described in the Google paper. One must figure that "in the spirit
it was intended" has to factor in the natural gas consumption,
otherwise my PUE would be about 0.1. :)
If you generate energy for your microturbine from a land fill (free
methane gas) your PUE would be nearly zero. Obviously PUE can be
skewed and shouldn't be considered as a single metric for anything
other than a press release.
I would also suggest that Alex shouldn't hold is breath on more
details. The details provided are interesting, but without context.
Indeed. If they would refuse a visit to Cory Doctorow writing for
Nature, I don't think we should hold our breath at
all :
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080903/full/455016a.html
" It doesn't disclose the dimensions or capacity of those data
centres. Nature wanted me to visit one for this piece, but a highly
placed Googler told me that no one from the press had ever been
admitted to a Google data centre; it would require a decision taken at
the board level. Which is too bad."
Regards
Marshall
(Its like:
"Hi, we filter our river water to evaporate it." But are they
calculating the cost of all that contaminated material and its
disposal? The blowdown on their cooling towers would have to be many
times more hazardous than normal, and may require additional
treatment to make it safe to release).
Is any math being done to decide whether free river/water-side
economization is more important (financially/environmentally) than
cheap energy inputs?
If rather than density, we REDUCE density and build very large foot
print data centers that can use ambient air (I've heard rumors that
MSFT is using 85 degree air [cool side] in New Mexico) we could get
to PUE numbers that were nearly ideal (hot air rises, natural
convection, no fans, just PDU overhead, etc).
Except where it impacts the bottom line, this all seems more like a
fashion show than an actual business plan.
Deepak Jain
