Electricity use and efficiency of servers and data centers: A review of recen... December 5, 2007

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Google Tech Talks
December, 4 2007

The Internet economy depends on a reliable computing infrastructure. While earlier reports of information technology using vast amounts all electricity were grossly exaggerated, these facilities still use electricity, and this use is growing rapidly. Recent analysis indicates that data center electricity use in both the US and the world roughly doubled from 2000 to 2005, and this growth is expected to slow only modestly over the following five years. Growth of this magnitude represents a substantial business opportunity for technology companies. This talk will describe results of recent work analyzing trends in total data center power use and how this growth varies by major world region. It will also explore the misplaced incentives and institutional failures that impede data center efficiency investments on a large scale. Finally, it will describe business, government, and research efforts to improve efficiency in these mission critical facilities, including recent work by the Energy Star program to promote server and data center efficiency.

Speaker: Jonathan Koomey
Dr. Koomey held the MAP/Ming visiting professorship in energy and environment at Stanford University for the 2003-2004 school year, and is now a Consulting Professor at Stanford. He is also a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), in Berkeley, California. For more than eleven years he led the End-Use Forecasting group at LBNL, which analyzes markets for efficient products and technologies for improving the energy and environmental aspects of those products. The group develops recommendations for policymakers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy on ways to promote energy efficiency and prevent pollution. He's also a Research Affiliate of the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.