Not to distrust Intel's study on temperature, but it makes a lot more sense for Microsoft and Google to raise their temperatures than smaller operations (like my company). We have a small server room (3 racks, mostly full), but we don't have seamless failover and often we're without hot spares. So, it matters that servers stay up.
With Google, it's not that big a deal. They expect failure and so it simply becomes a calculation of what's worth more, the electricity or the hardware and I'm guessing the electricity would win out in that situation. However, for us it's the hardware and the downtime and the hassle of setting up a box to support some ancient system some of which, no joke, date back to DOS days (or maybe I'm just really young and think that's old). Suffice it to say, it isn't seamless and it isn't even as easy as installing and configing a LAMP server.
I have been there and done that. One thing you should at least consider is seeing if you can get some of your more creaky servers to run in a VM, you can run DOS in virtualbox and probably xen as well, you might be able to replace a number of physical machines with a single virtualisation box ( a pair if you are serious about availability ).
Going this route should save you energy and space. If you can replace a rack full of machinery with 1U of server and 2U of disk shelf, you are way ahead of the game.
Last time visiting USA I was as usual turning off all the lights of the room I didn't need. After a few days I noticed a 747 could land with just the lighting of the long hallway. The hotel was mostly empty. I felt so stupid.
There is a need for USA business to revise their attitude on energy.
Fun fact: data centers account for 1.2% of American electricity usage. Finding more energy efficient data center architectures is a big deal that a lot of resources are devoted to. Even a small improvement can result in large energy and money savings.
"A study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, released last month, found that the power consumption of data centres doubled between 2000 and 2005, and now accounts for 1.2% of American electricity consumption, though other estimates put the figure at 4%."
There's a few professors here at UCSD that are interested in low-power computing and data center architecture. The statistic was sited in a talk by Prof. Tajana Rosing that I attended earlier this week.
There's one guy here that is working on ways to integrate flash with the system memory; he thinks he can reduce power usage by something like 40% in a data center setting.
Moreover, this could result in a revolution in computing. If only we could have memory fast as RAM and non-volatile as Flash, everyone would use it and it would simplyfy computing a lot.
Well, flash in its current form is better at certain tasks than either hard disks or RAM. Hard disks are big, cheap, and slow. RAM is expensive, power hungry, and fast. If I remember correctly, flash is faster than a hard disk, more energy efficient than either, and way cheaper than RAM. I'm not sure of the implementation details, but you could apparently make a system better on all three axes of performance, cost, and energy usage by mixing in flash.
I was bantering back and forth with a couple friends recently about what our dream datacenter/colo space would look like. We estimated with devices with good airflow you could stay within the operating temperature range of most computer components with the outdoor air temperature in North Dakota (at least on the high side... you'd have to close the vent window in the winter). It would be wild to operate a datacenter with no active cooling at all.
The sooner the days of wearing gloves in the datacenter are over the better, in my opinion. Bring the steel toed flip flops and cargo shorts. :)
Microsoft's considering opening a data center in Siberia, but the other side of the equation is the local electricity costs. If the juice to run the computers in Outer
Freezistan costs more than computers + AC in San Francisco, you save no money. Unless you're building a floating data center with built-in hydroelectric and solar thermal or something.
It's always better to keep the temperature on the low end. People that are cold can wear extra layers. About the only choice when the temperature is too high is to start taking your clothes off and depending on the setting those around you might not appreciate it.
Yeah, and they should raise the temperature in their free sex salon (the executive one). Last time I was there, even with all the hot chicks, it was so freezing I almost got sick!
With Google, it's not that big a deal. They expect failure and so it simply becomes a calculation of what's worth more, the electricity or the hardware and I'm guessing the electricity would win out in that situation. However, for us it's the hardware and the downtime and the hassle of setting up a box to support some ancient system some of which, no joke, date back to DOS days (or maybe I'm just really young and think that's old). Suffice it to say, it isn't seamless and it isn't even as easy as installing and configing a LAMP server.