Major data centers need a large amount of energy to power and maintain. There are two costs components of energy at a data center: Cooling and running computers. The EPA estimated that data centers in the United States used about 12 gig watts of power, which is equal to the output of twenty-five major power plants in 2011. By 2020, in estimation, the world’s computer servers will either match or exceed the carbon emissions of the airline industry.
Case Study Questions 1. PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness. It is a ratio between the total facility energy to the IT Equipment Energy. It is a method to deliver power and cooling to the IT Equipment. It is an important place to start to measure your PUE to see how much energy and cooling you are using. According to Google, Your PUE must be as low as possible and should be checked every minute, second, and chance you get. Checking it consistently will bring realistic results rather than checking it from time to time. The value of PUE should be about 1.0.
2. The five methods recommended by Google for reducing power consumption is to measure PUE to deliver efficient power and cooling to the IT equipment, manage airflow to implement simple design choices to improve air circulation in the data center, adjust thermostat by the raising slightly raising the temperature to save thousands of dollars in energy costs, utilize free cooling by using ambient temperature outside the building using heavy cooling machinery less, and optimize power distribution by eliminating three conversion stages to efficiently save energy and money .
3. About 20 percent of the world’s global greenhouse gases are the result of computing. In that 20 percent, 15 percent of it is from data centers and 5 percent are of large internet data centers. There are two factors that accelerate power consumption: cloud computing and audio/video streaming. The core of the issue is power usage. Being that streaming uses less energy,