Computing energy bill goes through the roof

SERVERS IN THE US burned up around five million kilowatts of energy in 2005, the equivalent to that generated by five 1,000 Megawatt power stations, a study sponsored by AMD suggests.

When you add in cooling and auxiliary equipment as well as the servers themselves, total data centre electricity consumption in the United States was approximately 45 billion kWh, resulting in total utility bills amounting to $2.7 billion.

According to the report written by Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, in all, total data centre power and electricity consumption across the world is estimated to cost $7.2 billion annually. This amounts to a doubling of server energy use over the last five years.

Revealing the details of the survey in a keynote address at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York today, Randy Allen, corporate vice president at AMD's server and workstation division, said he thinks the findings should be, "a wake-up call not just for the IT industry, but also for global business, government and policy leaders."

Allen reckons the study, "demonstrates that unchecked demand for data centre energy use can constrain growth and present real business challenges."

AMD said it plans to sit down with the American Environmental Protection Agency and others in Silicon Valley tomorrow and work out what is to be done. Its favourite solution is to flog more AMD chips that it says are more environmentally friendly.

"These issues, traditionally thought of as issues reserved for a company's IT department, need to be brought directly into the board room. Our hope is that this study will not only advance this critical industry discussion and help the EPA meet its mandate, but also significantly advance AMD's commitment to lead the industry to energy-efficient computing," Allen said. µ