MIT Report Could Save Internet Companies Millions
Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook are some of the internets biggest names. All of them have huge online presence with millions of hits every single day. Their names have become so well known that even elderly people who have never sat at a computer know what they are. Ever think about their electricity bills?
Me neither, until I came across a report by MIT which states that they are easily spending $30 million per annum on electricity. This is to keep their servers up and running. First they have to power the servers. Then comes the technology that runs them and all the cooling and networking systems in between. A tall task with an even taller bill.
This report suggests a way in which these companies could save on their electricity bills.
It doesn’t offer a green solution of cutting back, rather it suggests that they constantly change which servers power their machines on a daily, even hourly basis.
So for example, the cost of electricity could rise in the US for any given reason so they shift the workload to servers in Belgium where the electricity is cheaper on that particular day.
While this would be a costly investment to begin with, it should pay off. After all, the total energy usage by the internet’s servers is set to go up four times within the next decade. Time for the big lads to make a big decision I think.
3 Comments
IMHO, this is total nonsense, they should just focus on how to make a nice investment in renewable energies to go green now and get the profits in a few years.
But I’m sure the guys at MIT are way smarter than me. We’ll see.
It actually does make sense for as there’s a lot of spare (=wasted) electricity produced by most electricity sources – be it coal or nuclear powerplants and from green sources like wind and water. I think solar energy is actually the only source that is only produced during day time.
The problem I see it is that the servers you have in the States can’t be (fully) replaced by servers in Europe because of bandwidth problems.