I was chatting at a party Friday night with a gentleman who sells data center construction projects. He made the point that data center power consumption accounts for 4% of overall electricity consumption. What’s more, he said that this percentage is only going to go up.
I’ve been thinking for a while now about how cloud technologies are not only affecting our computing habits but also our power consumption. When the Internet Age first dawned, the backend of websites consisted of beefy servers that did all the work of serving up websites: databases to churn out data, a layer to render it (PHP, Java, etc.), and so forth.
Today, there are still websites serving up data but it’s now done far more efficiently. Most of the rendering is now done on the client end (Javascript), reducing the load on the backend. Databases custom-designed for web work are being used for much greater increases in speed. Also, whereas in the past websites may have had dedicated hardware for each task, today these are most likely divided into virtual hosts (cloud services, VMWare. etc.), squeezing the most performance out of each physical server. Even more on the cutting edge, contanierization now offers efficiency that is leaps and bounds above virtualization alone. Indeed, the data center has never been more efficient.
On the client side the reduction in power consumption is just as dramatic. It wasn’t long ago that computers came with electricity-hogging cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors. Add power supplies sucking 300 watts of power and factor in the thermal load on your home of all that gear and you have a significant power load.
Now the client end is done mostly with ultra-powerful laptops. CRTs have been relegated to the world’s scrap heaps, replaced by highly-efficient (and highly viewable) LED displays. What’s better, the majority of web traffic now passes through mobile devices: tablets and smartphones. Today’s Raspberry Pi embedded computers can run rings around computers that were top of the line just 15 years ago at a cost of ten bucks. All of these devices use a mere trickle of electricity compared to home PCs of the past.
Where does this leave us? We’re doing things far more efficiently than we ever have. Incredibly powerful computing resources now fit in the palm of my hand and use just a few watts of power. Data centers are moving load to the client side and their servers are packing in applications highly-efficiently using containerization and virtualization.
And just ahead are solid-state hard drives (SSDs) which will are vastly more efficient than their traditional, platter equivalents. The prices of SSDs have dropped drastically in the past few years, almost of the point of cost parity with platters. They’re lightning fast, have no moving parts, require far less cooling than platter drives, and of course use a fraction of the power. When SSDs move into the data centers you’re going to really see some power efficiency.
It’s an exciting world we’re living in.