The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

Internet’s power is power hungry

Very interesting article in the August 1^st issue of FORTUNE Magazine: “Behold the server farm! Glorious temple of the information age!” It’s about the Internet backstage; about the millions (yes, millions!) of elementary computers (a.k.a. servers) that power sites like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Before reading this article, I thought that a website like Google was powered by a few regional installations made of a few thousands servers, each in a 2 cm thick ‘pizza box’ enclosure, staked in 2 meter tall racks (each rack holding about 100 computers). Behind each rack, a spaghetti junction of optical fibre and power cables. The whole shebang in a room the size of a basketball playground, with some decent air conditioning.

My vision was supported by the fact that the industry uses the term ‘server farm’ to describe such installations. You imagine some bucolic and environment-friendly set-up where ‘brick and mortar’ is insignificant compared with ‘point & click’, don’t you? 

Wrong! Google’s newest sites contain an estimated half-million to one million servers. Forget about the agricultural analogy with gentle ploughing, sowing and harvesting cycles. We’re talking hard ‘stuff’ here. As serious as industrial age’s mills, mines, furnaces, foundries, workshops, factories and plants. Not so much smoke but certainly a lot of heat. Powering the Internet requires lots of (electrical) power, tens of megawatts per ‘farm’.

The paradox is that the information age seems to spend as much energy to cool its installations as it does to power its servers. Isn’t it like driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake pedal?