Data centre dilemma: How online consumption is leading to higher energy use, costs

At first glance, the old barge docked at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard looks like it's just taking a breatheron its slow journeyto the scrap yard.

Most ofthe browned, pitted metal panels that formthe deck areslightly warped, creating hundreds of tiny reflectivepools. A few have been removed, creating man-sizedholes that nearly landedthis unwary journalist inthe bowels of the ship. Below deck, machines roar and hiss as workers scoop outthebarge'sinsides.Over the next couple of months, the vessel will be transformed into a state-of-the-art world-first.Other companies have tried to buildtheir own versions of this ship, and until now, all have failed.

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"You're seeing the future," says KirkHorton. "You're seeing the revolution."

Seeing the revolution takes some imagination.

The vice-president of Nautilus Data Technologies leads meacross the deck carefully, avoiding the puddles and holes. The age and condition of the barge is part of the plan; the company says it intends to only retrofit pre-owned vessels as part of its commitment to environmental sustainability.Hortonsays in about five months, this ship certified as sea-worthy by theU.S.Coast Guard will be fully operational. Already companies have bought space for their servers.

"This is the world's first highly efficient, highly sustainable waterborne data centre," says Horton.

Whether they're the size of airplane hangars or tiny closets tucked away in the basement, data centreshouse rows and rows of disk arrays and routers the building blocks of theinternetthat store and transmit our data.

Using the ocean for efficiency

What makes this data centre sospecial isn't justthat it'sin the ocean, but the fact thatitwill be cooled by the very waterupon which it floats.

"So this is our heat exchange," saysArnoldMagcale, the company's CEO. We step intoa small shack next to the barge which houses aminiature version of what will be installed on the barge.It was used to prove that his concept actually works.

He points to the pipes that run behind the server racks. The water in the pipes absorbsheat, then is expelled back in the oceanwhilecoolwater is drawnin. A virtuous circle, he says, that has passed every environmental assessment so far.

"What we're doing here is moving water versus moving air, which is five times more efficient," says Magcale.

It can savecompanies as much as 40 per centon their energy bill, adds Horton.

"With the advent of bigdata, as cloud technology further progresses, you're going to see more and more advanced IT technology the server infrastructure, the equipment, the storage devices they will continue to draw more and more power," says Horton.

The Nautilus barge located about 40 kilometres northeast of San Francisco is an attempt to solvea problem most people didn'teven know existed.

'The new modern-day factories'

Every time you update your Facebook profile, every time you email a friend, every timeyou stream your favourite show, somewhere in a dark roomin a building far away, lights flicker, servers whirand air conditioners roar.Every year, we use more data. Everyyear, the number of data centres grows. And every year, those data centresuse more electricity.

"Data centres are the new modern-day factories," saysMukesh Khattar,technical executive with the Electric Power Research Institute, an organization funded by the electrical utility industry.

In 2000, before the prevalence of streaming companies like Netflix,data centres accounted for one per centof U.S. power consumption, he says.By 2015, that number tripled.

"That number's increasing continuously," saysKhattar. "And you can see that. Everybody has a cellphone these days, everybody has a portable device. All of these devices are connected in the back-end to a data centre."

Inside the data centres, theservers generateso much heat thatifthey're not kept cool, theymelt.

"For every unit of energy that goes into powering IT in an average data centre, you need another unit ofenergy to cool the data centre down," says Pierre Delforge, director of high-tech sector efficiencyatthe National Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group.

If you thinkof each data centre as a plane taking off, Delforge says,only about 10 per centof the seats the serversare used. That's because data centresare designed to handle "peak load," which is the maximum amount of traffic they're expected to experience,like arush of customers on Cyber Monday.

"The problem isthe other 364 days in the year, they're still running all the servers," says Delforge."They're not powering them down when they're not needed."

Energy efficiency as an after-thought?

Out there, he says,is a robot army close to15million strong, waiting for orders that rarely come.

Khattar believes it'sbecause those who run corporate data centres aren't responsible for how much energy their IT systems use;they're judged on reliability and speed.

"Do you want to wait for a few seconds to get your picture downloaded? No!" says Khattar. "We want it instantaneously. And companies are just responding to that."

You mightthink the villain in the black hat would be internet giantslike Facebook.To handle the company'sone trillion page views each month, Facebook operates several server farms, some of which are about the size of six football fields.But big companies have big energy bills, so they have an incentive to cut the amount of power theirdata centres use.

"The estimate I think it was about a year ago was that we saved over $2 billion," says Facebook'sdirector of sustainability Bill Weihl. "Which means it's well worth investing the time and money."

That investment led to the development of new, stripped-down, highly efficient servers that produce less heat. Weihl says three of Facebook'sdata centres run entirely on clean energy. At the other end of the high-tech spectrum, the companyuses something called "free cooling."Basically windows.

"We open up the window on one side and blow the hot air out.We open up the door on the other side and bring in cool air from outside," says Weihl. "The amount of energy we've saved is the equivalent of the energy used in a year by about 78,000 U.S. homes, and avoided emissions [are] the same astaking about 95,000 cars off the road."

Small server closets can add up

Experts like Delforgesayit may be counter-intuitive, butthe Facebooks of the worldaren't really the problem.

"The cloud-computing companies like Facebook, Google, and others, they're only responsible for collectively about five per centof all data centre energy use," Delforge says. "Individuallythey use a lot of energy, but there's relatively few of them compared to all the small server closets and small rooms that you find in virtually every floor of every office building in the country."

Those account for about half of the energy used by data centres, he says.

"This is a very old data centre," saysKhattar, taking me on a short tour ofthe classroom-sizeddata centrebeing phased out by his own organization.

To keep their servers cool, most companies with small data centresjust blast the A/C. The people who run the majority of IT departments aren't aware that the industry standard has changed. New data shows that the air used to cool servers can actually be about 11 degreesCelsius(20F) warmer.

"The mechanical equipment the hardware doesn't require you to be as cold as in the past," Khattar says. "You can use much warmer air and your system will work very efficiently under those conditions."

Andthere's more good news. While olderdata centres requireas much energy to cool as they do to operate,new ones only need one-tenth of the energy.

"The newer ones being built by the large companies are already more efficient," Khattar says. "There's a big,big improvement happening in the infrastructure side."

But Delforge is still skeptical.

"At the moment we're seeing a few leaders in the high-tech industry and other sectors pioneer new technology that can significantly reduce data-centre energy, but we need more than just a few shining examples," Delforge says. "We need the majority and eventually all data-centre operators to use these best practices."

Even if they do,there's another challenge:theJevonsparadox.Nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevonsobserved that when technology improvesefficiency, consumption doesn't go down, it goes up.

And that, Delforgefears, seems to be the case with data centres.

"Progress is being outpaced by the rapid growth of the industry," he says.

Watch Kim Brunhuber's report on data centres and power consumption on The National, Friday at 9 p.m.