Google power: 900,000 servers, uses 0.01% of world’s electricity | Hacker News Reader

Google power: 900,000 servers, uses 0.01% of world’s electricity

geek.com

39 points11031a14 comments

Articles like this are hilarious, especially for those of us that helped design, build and manage Google's datacenters at one point or another.

First, the number of servers may be impressive, but anyone that's done large scale computing can quickly point out that it's one of the least important measures. Much more important are how they are connected, the performance and ease of use of the distributed software infrastructure, resource utilization per machine, etc.

Second, these numbers are almost always wrong.

I just like the power requirement %. Knowing how much power some servers put out and their overall utilization would be more impressive stat-wise to me. I've seen far too many systems sit with a sub 1 load average that sucked up way too many watts of power needlessly.

But you're 100% right about what matters is the overall application and its performance. The devil is in the details. At my job we only have 5ish k linux boxes, so an order of magnitude smaller. But still fun. Except the z-series nodes. /shudder

The key sentence from this article: "Realistically though, this is just a best guess made by Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey."

I wonder how many unnecessary car trips Google prevents. It certainly spares me from going to the library for an hour searching for a single fact.

Exercises like these seldom take your most valuable resource into account. Your time.

Tagline (Spin): Google Uses .01% of the World's Electricity to Directly Impact 50% of the World's Population

It must be cool to apply a performance patch that lets you decommission thousands of servers.

Realistically what happens is that you apply a performance patch that delays the purchase of the next thousand servers.

Depends on real estate agreements, power costs, etc.

They're still decommissioned for the current project. Or whatever the opposite of requisition is. I think decommission is right.

Another stat is that they use less than 1% of the energy of all datacenters on Earth. That's pretty impressive for the Internet company.

How on earth do you manage nearly a million server?

I can barely deal with a few of them. Always something going on.

I guess it helps theirs are all identical images?

Yeah, we had this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832164

Actually I thought "that is too much", given that electricity is consumed inefficiently in the developed world by individuals, while Google has the ability to do massive optimization.

Why not link to the original? blog: http://www.koomey.com/post/8323374335 article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/01/repor... nyt: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/technology/data-centers-us...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com