How Much Energy Does The Internet Use?
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- Опубліковано 10 тра 2015
- The internet uses a lot of energy! But people have come up with ways to make it more efficient. This episode was produced in collaboration with and sponsored by Emerson. www.emerson.com/ilovestem
Hosted by: Hank Green
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Sources:
www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solution...
www.nrdc.org/energy/data-cente...
www.energystar.gov/ia/products...
www.livescience.com/47552-data...
news.nationalgeographic.com/ne...
www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/tec...
science.time.com/2013/08/14/po...
www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?...
www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?...
www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?...
Solve the heating problem and unemployment all at once. get people to manually fan servers 24/7 with huge pharaoh-like fans.
One more step towards Skynet.
Ghost81 LOL, this comment is legendary
Ghost81 First comment to make me genuinely laugh in a long time. Also: I know what you mean obviously, but "pharao-like fans" are not the way to express it, haha. I'm imagining people fanning dataservers with miniature statues of Ramses :')
***** I know people in first world countries that would
Victor Kyrg Hm, well, how would you call them? That's the only way I could find that conveyed the idea.
Ghost81 offer me 14 bucks an hour and im there.
Concept - that heat can be reused to inefficiently generate small amounts of power.
Concept - use the building's own water system to control temperature; the people upstairs need cold water for toilets and sinks, so there are pipes taking that water up there. Have the "cold aisles" contain pillars wherein these cold water lines feed, making that air colder.
Concept - set up more data centers in Canada, where the exhaust can heat a room in our cold-ass winters.
This energy is just what the finished product uses. It doesn't cover the mining, processing, manufacturing, transporting... to put the servers in place and get them operational.
Good point. I would think that if you looked far enough into the economics of it, everyone in the world has contributed to the formation of the internet as it is today in some way. Everyone who reads this will have, anyway, because they are consumers of the internet.
The new thing here in Sweden (which is dense in district heating) is to use heat pumps to cool the datacenters and transfer the heat over to the district heating network. This is technology that is also starting to get utilized in big research facilities, such as MAX Lab in Lund, a synchrotron light accelerator.
People commenting before they physically could even watch the video completely.
TheArzonite Are you sure? A lot of us watch the videos sped up, so this one took me just over 2 minutes to finish. I don't know, but it's possible others are doing the same.
Heather L Kelly Do you purposely not try and take in any of the information? That's really weird.
TheCheddarMan1 Of course not. I find watching at regular speed to be extremely boring. I followed this one just fine. Sometimes I have to slow them down a bit, but not usually on SciShow.
TheCheddarMan1 actually studies have shown that listening to information at higher speed _increases_ how much information you take in. I see no reason to assume that the same wouldn't be true of video information.
Jim Cullen [Citation needed]
Working in a large datacenter I knew most of this stuff, however it is great to see it covered accurately for your average person. We have a ton of virtualized servers running on very powerful blade servers which are more efficient than some of the bigger servers. Unfortunately it's not always an option either due to software interacting poorly with virtual hardware / drivers.
One thing that isn't really mentioned though about keeping it cold in the datacenters is that if a single AC unit goes out the whole rooms temperature skyrockets making it dangerous for the hardware, so even though it's not bad for them to run hotter doesnt mean you want to turn the temp in the room up save some money. Because even being without the AC for a portion of the room for a few minutes could be catastrophic.
All told, very good video.
HANK! We watched SciShow at school yesterday, and I was like "OMG ITS HANK GREEN!" and everyone gave me weird looks... NONE HAVE SEEN YOU BEFORE!
AND THEN! Everyone started calling you "Fast Talker"... (I guess they are a little bit plain..)
scarletttheraccoon One day, my mom and I were just laying in her bedroom on our laptops, and I was watching some SciShow and Crash Course. Of course, the only thing she could say about what I was watching was 'Can he talk any faster?'
scarletttheraccoon That once happened to me except with VSauce. But I managed to keep in my outburst of "OMG ITS VSAUCE!" because I knew no one else would understand.
These are the moments to flash your teacher the Nerdfighter sign. If they're showing a Green bros video of any kind, they'll probably do it back. Then you look like you're in on something mysterious. (Which may be more socially advantageous in high school than obvious fangushing, if you care about that.) Plus, if there are any other Nerdfighters in your class you know they'll totally join in... and then you'll know.
scarletttheraccoon I like Hank Thompson and his kickers better than Hank Green when it comes to hanks..
Tell them the VlogB's watched too much "Gilmore Girls" as wee'uns.
Another efficient way of cooling servers is to have a raised floor with the cool air blowing under it. Add a vent for each rack, and have an Air handler pulling air from the top of the rack, keep the rack doors closed unless you are servicing a server, and your cooling efficiency goes way up. It is move expensive at the start, but the energy savings in the long run are substantial. To keep the room itself cool you can add a few vents to the floor panels throughout the room.
"The Internet isn't going anywhere"
Then my Internet cuts out.
Great.
Water cool the data centres then make the hot water useful somewhere? Say maybe the central heating or hot water supply of an apartment block that sits above it?
Or use it to generate further electricity. It's not a perpetual motion machine, but it could help to alleviate the power cost.
Scott Dann Maybe. Sounds like it would be a tad unreliable for an entire apartment block.
Scott Dann LOL i don't know about you but i don't want to drink water with anti algae chemicals in them...
Scott Dann That's why i don't drink the water when i flush my loop even when i'm thirsty :P
Gavin Black how very witty. You could still use it for heating applications where heat is desired.
I think it's worth mentioning that having data centers in cold countries is a good idea, since you can use the outside air to cool the servers.
you should heat public swimming pools with server heat
graaf youtube ask the reddit about this yeah?
graaf Kirito coming up with that is genuinely a good plot for SAO 4.
What is a public swimming pool? No kidding, all of the commercially owned and publicly owned swimming pools in my area have been closed down. The last commercially owned pool closed over 30 years ago, and the publicly owned swimming pools at parks haven't been operating for over 10 years. There are a few pools at high schools and our two collages, but these are not open to the public. Back-yard pools have made public pools a thing of the past. At least in my area.
Why isn't the heat produced from data centers used to, oh, I don't know......CREATE MORE ENERGY?!?!
Marv Roberts Heh, ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?
Alaska1925
Yes, I know you would never get more or even the same amount of energy as you put in but it seems the heat could be used to power some LED lighting in the data centers.
Marv Roberts Some companies store their server in random homes. It's save so long as the residents aren't hackers. Their server is used as a radiator for the family.
Marv Roberts I'm This now has me thinking of Server / Pool Complexes, the waste heat can be dumped into heating the pool
Marv Roberts It's not like its not being done at all. And you're right, in the future we should use that heat, and we will.
But, to explain the problem:
Remember the numbers he called up. They're cooling the racks down to 13-27°C. Now theres a heat pump (AC) being used, and the the exhaust of that will be hotter, but still, for heat to be really useable, you need a large deltaT (difference between two temperatures). Think of the cooling towers of power stations. To create that steam they're exhausting, HUUUUGE amounts of energy are dissipated, simply because the deltaT isn't enough to do something with it.
Now lets say, that the AC units of the datacenters are exhausting 50°C hot air. That still isn't very useable. To heat homes, you usually supply them with water around 80°C and to create that, you need to (heat)pump it up those extra degrees which takes additional energy, not even talking about getting that energy to a place where it is consumed.
In the end, it isn't impossible, just often inefficient.
Thanks for making a video - Always wondered about this!
3:30 Heat is the enemy. They keep the machines that cold in part so that the machines last longer. Hardware virtualization is really good for cutting the number of servers, but in some situations excess servers are specifically available for handling peak times such as Christmas. That depends a lot on load balancing though. I'm not a genius, but I am a knowledgeable CS student that cares a lot about computers.
I work for a large data center company, they have very smart ways of cutting energy like allowing the data center to get as hot as 75 degrees before using the ac, using the plastic sheets like you see in your grocery store to better manage the cold and hot intakes of the servers, as well as shutting off the AC at night and sucking in cold air from outside. Really smart people working behind the scenes here.
How much energy does the internet SAVE o_O
i'm sorry dave, i'm afraid i can't do that... HAL 9000
teehee dad you are silly
I am the manager over a data center. The way they keep the servers at a low temperature is by pumping the air conditioning through a raised floor.
The floor people walk on is actually just a set of tiles that site on top of bars that are sticking up a few feet off the ground. Each tile is shaped to lock into place at each of their corners on these bars. This allows wires and air conditioning to run to each server under the floor. If you lift up one of these tiles cold air will blow through the hole.
This setup makes it easy to work and get to the servers without having to trip over wires, and it keeps the cold air and warm air separated since all the cold air blows up from the floor through the server or through vented tiles into the room above. In addition, it keeps the people working on the servers further from the ground so there is less risk of electric shock while working on a running machine.
Virtualization is also good in simply just having less hardware to deal with AND gives a ton of benefits such as easily backing up and restoring servers, as well as migrating servers.
At home I run a server on a computer I found on the side of the road and I virtualize everything for various reasons (mainly so if I break something it doesn't break the other servers I'm running).
However, lots of people are starting to use things like Docker (I think that's the name) to do the same thing we've been doing with virtualization, but without having to run a guest OS (so it's more efficient as you don't waste resources running another OS). At least, from what I've heard. I've yet to use Docker so I don't know much about how it works (but I plan to look into it at some point as it sounds like a good idea).
Make Antarctica the worlds datahub
Jacy Wilson and melt that ice even faster
There is guidelines that prevent that kind of stuff happening to Antartica. It would be pretty cool though.
SuperMRTrollington Eyyyyy.
liltonyabc Actually Antarctica has had record ice depth for years, and now the climate cult will proceed to bash me for stating a scientific fact.
Jacy Wilson And experience pretty much the worst lag ever.
my room is 30 degrees C. Does that mean I'm saving energy? :^)
***** Wha... what even. That's *really* hot. How did you even REMOTELY THINK that you are saving energy?
it's pretty comfy tbh
uluʜƚƆ Depends what the ambient temperature is. 30 C is pretty mild for summer here. I don't tend to turn the air conditioner on until 37-ish, and doing so is certainly saving energy.
OrcinusDrake damn son, you will cook at those temps!
I work in data centers pretty much all the time. The biggest thing that they can do is pump the hot air from a "hot aisle" outside the data center. Then, use ambient air from outside (depending on temperature) and then cool that instead of cooling air that is already hotter than outside. I.e reducing 27C to 19C instead of reducing 22C to 19C is a pretty huge cost saving exercise. Yes, there is an issue of humidity (depending on where the DC is, so this may not be a viable option). In winter, it boggles the mind that air conditioners continuously work 24/7/365 when there is sufficient cold air outside. Finding a way to use the cold outside air with no humidity is the ultimate goal to reduce cooling costs to maybe 1/5th of their current usage (maybe more?). The only cost would be the fans pumping the air and some dehumidifiers in each hall, which I suppose would be far cheaper than permanent AC.
Thank you for another awesome video Scishow And Hank Green :)
Would it not be feasible to liquid cool the servers, and use a common plumbing system for the whole cooling setup? This way you could move all the heat to one place for other uses. Similarly you could also submerge the servers into mineral oil filled tanks, if putting water blocks on every server is too cost prohibitive.
KrazeeCain The problem with that is if a drive fails, you can't really just swap it out in mineral water. It becomes impractical.
Not mineral water, mineral oil. HDDs wouldn't even work in oil anyways, they'd have to be mounted outside of the oil.
KrazeeCain Sorry i meant oil, yes it would work but as stated, wouldn't be feasible as if anything failed, it can't be replaced easily(or cost effectively).
Super computers are liquid cooled. I'd say servers aren't as they are mostly HDD which are kinda inefficient to wc.
Yes this is a 2 year old post but hey, i'd thought i'd offer my 2 cents. Fast forward to 2017, there are actual server racks that are liquid cooled! I happen to be working in a data center, and LinkIn rents several data halls and their technology is very advanced compared to what a lot of companies do, what they have are specially designed servers to allow airflow threw them WITHOUT the use of internal fans, the entire rack is air tight and what happens is, at the top of the rack, a giant enclosed radiator transfers heat from flowing air to the liquid that is pumped from the rack to cooling towers elsewhere in the building. The air is pulled from the radiator to the front of the rack where it then travels threw the servers to the rear of the rack where it's collected and moved to the radiator to complete the circuit.
Actually water cooling each server is theoretically possible, but impractical and very costly, the solution described above works very very well and, although it doesn't matter to most people, it Drastically reduces noise pollution from the thousands of fans of servers and is a god send for data center engineers.
You talk about this like the data servers make up the internet but do they really use more power than all the other internet connected devices? Hard to calculate I know but a rough estimate would be kind of nice.
Benny Kolesnikov Well, every single website and game you connect to is on a data server, the demand of consumer electronics is negligible.
Actually its not that hard to measure. You just conduct an experiment on the server which measures the daily traffic, and you find out how much power is being used by how many devices are connecting to the data servers. Find the daily traffic of a Google server (for example) and multiply by number of known data servers to get an average - should work.
Benny Kolesnikov To start off. One lamp server can easly run up to 300 concurrent users so yah do the math.
jackcarr45 What about the fact that most users are on their phones, but I'm always on my desktop, and with several tabs open, not considering the fact that each machine is connected to massive amounts of servers, the demand of each end user varies incredibly.
Ebot75 That's where averages come into place. You're never going to calculate the result perfectly, so using a way of averaging results from a sample usually seems to get a close idea.
For example, the admin or owner of a server can find the average daily traffic to the server. He can then use a form of sampling to ask people how much power their internet-connected devices use (a lot more people seem to know this now because we can find out the wattage of virtually any device online). From those that can calculate their results, we create an average that is representative of the whole population. That will give us an idea of how much power people really use. I can imagine people who maintain these servers monitor these types of things to make sure they know what to upgrade in their server to give users their best experience.
2:50 Every server room I have seen had suspended floor. The cold air pressurised under the floor, flows up through the server racks and exits into the room from the top of the rack. Then it gets extracted from vents close to ceiling level.
There's a trial running in the netherlands right now where a sets of servers are placed in peoples homes in a radiator set upmeant to heat up the house! It seems like a great idea to use the excess heat!
I refuse to save anything in the "cloud". You no longer own that data, you essentially give that data to someone else and let them use that data however they want. Be it facebook, dropbox, microsoft, google or any others, the moment you upload something there, it's not yours anymore. Read the ToS, you're essentially selling your soul for a cheap service.
So why aren't the exhaust ports of all these servers connected to a tube exhaust, much like a dryer? So the heat is never even introduced into the room and funneled directly outside.
That's exactly what newest generation of datacenters are doing. Not every server have its own pipe but group of racks share single exhaust channel.
Joonas Lehtonen Damnit, just as I was on my way to the patent office to make millions of dollars, you had to be a major buzzkill!
Christopher Eves Because with the numbers they gave, even the heated exhaust is cooler than the outside temp in most places.
Christopher Eves That's effectively what the hot/cold aisle is about. But there's some issues with outside interaction.
Outside air is rarely suitable for large D/Cs. To maximize server lifetime air is kept at a specific humidity and purified of any dust/particles. Dust can damage servers in the long run, dry air causes static build up while wet air could precipitate.
Too many D/Cs are located in places like Dallas where the airs way too hot for passive cooling, but that can be solved.
Many companies, such as Facebook, are building new D/Cs in areas such as Canada, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. For whatever reason these polar countries tend to be more socialist, but they also have few people and lots of renewable (hydro, geothermal, etc) energy = low energy costs. Likewise because they're so cool you can use passive cooling, with a heat exchange to chill internal air.
Google is also doing cool stuff, with watercooling loops taking advantages of rivers and such. Only really practical though because Google has standardized hardware, many D/Cs take lots of different gear.
"Close the lights when you are not using it!..." - Mom
*Mom pulls out phone to check on Facebook*
"...It saves electricity!"
You don't have a like so.... Here 1 like for you
Yes having a hotter server room might save energy at the risk of fire and lower performance as hot electronics doesn't have as good performance as colder. You can also press the server harder with a cold environment then a hot one. I never actually experience any of the horror stories I have heard in any server rooms I have been in but I have heard some bad shit of what can happen if the cooling just disappear in a server room for a day or less. Enough to give you a burn when you take the door handle.
If all energy was solar generated then we really wouldn't need to worry about using the energy or leaving anything on.
inSpihr Solar Frickin' Roadways man! They are the future!
ICan'tThinkOfAnOriginalName Esquire Ehh, that goal is a bit untouchable, but what do you call cities that have plants all over them? that would be sweet as fuck, it was on Cosmos.
inSpihr sounds kinda cool
inSpihr Solar, Hydroelectric, and Cold Fusion (If we can figure out how to achieve it) are all we would need. And fusion releases SOOOO much energy that we probably wouldn't need the others, fission plants with uranium are 1000 times less stronger than fusion, deuterium and tritium FTW!
***** We don't know how to do that yet though... And if solar panels were able to last longer than 12 years it would be way safer and easier to do than fusion
Electricity and internet = best inventions
Electricity is not an invention...
Diana Peña haha you're right, but i think i got my point across
Diana Peña Inventing the methods to use electricity, that is an invention, which is of course what he meant. No need to debate semantics is there?
Diana Peña The many uses of it and making it easier to produce and use are inventions.
GlennGJ100 What about vaccines and medicine in general, without it people would only live from 30-50 mostly. I could live without internet but i would die without medicine.
One problem with operating servers at temperatures close to the upper limit they can tolerate is if you have a failure of a cooling component you have no margin for error, and the only way to prevent the circuits from being damaged is to shut them down. All of the main frame units I have worked around have an automatic shutdown feature if they reach a cretin temperature. If you keep the equipment room temperature considerably below the critical "equipment tolerance level", you have a better chance of fixing a cooling problem before the servers go into their automatic shutdown mode. Whether you're using chillers or conventional air conditioning, when you have a component fail, it takes time to rectify the problem. Nothing makes a computer user madder than to have their server go off line.
There is also a way to contribute as an individual user to limiting the usage of resources by the Internet: clean up your cloud spaces. All the thousands of old emails, pictures you do not need on Google Drive, old documents on Doogle docs, etc. take up space and energy on the servers. If you delete old data you will prevent or at least delay the need of the servers to expand, as they need to serve the always raising number of data to be stored, and save the energy needed to produce the new computer, and to run them.
Sure, it's a teeny tiny bit, but if enough people routinely do it, it can make an impact.
No. Not on Hard drives, on millions of SSDs all in Raid 0.
Not really, but could you imagine?
Matt Hoffman what if we just went Raid 0 on everything, imagine the glorious catastrophe
ItsDenn Oooh.... let's cut down windows loading by another couple seconds! Raid 0 for everyone!
Matt Hoffman However the SSD's would fail in seconds.
***** Woooah, not so fast there. They aren't that unreliable. Even consumer ones from 4 years ago weren't. techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead And that's 2.5 petabytes WRITTEN. Read is fine for a looooooooong time.
Matt Hoffman Good point.
Its saving power trough not having to cut down trees and not having to use cars to transport said paper to the right location, IM purely talking about the whey we exchange of data here, not the you can burn wood for power bullshit. I mean if you wanted you could start stealing every hard drive in your neighborhood and light that up as-well in order to create some electricity.
Simon P Cutting down trees doesn't use power, and in some occasions, it even PRODUCES power.
uluʜƚƆ Sorry, those two statements don't make sense to me
OrcinusDrake I made a typo, but I fixed it.
uluʜƚƆ How so?
maxsnts If you don't see it, than I don't know why you don't understand it
Now that sounds like a lot of HOT AIR!...
The specs for the servers we run in the datacenter I work at says you can run them up to 95°F. But even so, I'd be hesitant to run them at the 81°F your video suggests. My guess is that keeping the servers at a cooler 75°F will increase their reliability and lifespan. (It will also save energy on the fans, since they run slower in a cooler environment, although that savings probably wouldn't be enough to compensate for the A/C energy used.)
I agree with your main point, though: it may be that datacenters could be run warmer than they often are, which would save significant energy.
2% seems not so bad! I mean Lets all think how much we use time on the internet on phone and on computers ! I have a bitcoin farm using 5 GPUs and they usually run around 40-60 C and I have it setup so I have two fans blowing air in to the GPU's and then I have a big fan for intake and 2 smaller ones for exhaust and about 80% of the exhaust goes outside so my room doesn't get hot =)
***** Very curious, hope you don't find this rude but i was wondering how much do you make a month on bitcoin and what are your costs? (Startup and running)
***** Yeah, that is pretty much why I dislike bitcoin... It is the firsty currency that is actually quite bad for the environment, at least that I ever heard of ;)
Bit coins are not profitable if you use gpus, ASIIC Miners are multitudes faster and more power efficient
qqleq2 Eh, bad for the environment isn't a given at all. There are many ways to generate static immobile energy cleanly. Hydro power is the most efficient. Also nuclear energy is awesome. (The waste is an issue but it doesn't contribute to climate change).
UnknownXV You forgot the best one of all, solar. lol
Interesting, perhaps this there Internet is the culprit for Global Warming -'J
When I think of the cloud, I think of one of those hellacarriers from the Avengers just loaded with a bunch of computer servers and hard-drives, with the Google logo painted on the runway.
Heat pumps and in winter turn data centers into server furnaces. Instead of a/c's cooling them off, the heat from the server is used to supplement heat to the building helping save on heating costs.
"Every half a degree increase in temperature can add up to a 5% decrease in energy costs"
I love exorbitant claims like this.
So If I increase the temperature 10 degrees the servers cool themselves for free?
What about 20 degrees? do I get paid?
Diminishing returns.
bensemus x
As is always, but taking these claims at face value is always fun.
You're talking about data centres and the cloud, not the internet itself....
LickableLemon The Internet IS a collection of servers. What?
LickableLemon The cloud is a metaphor for the internet. "In the cloud" just means not here, but elsewhere, through the internet. Also, data centers essentially make up almost everything that is on the internet
AnotherVGP don't get near it you will catch its stupidity.
Lemon, you fucktard.
The Internet is just one great big lan connection.
i know someone will of already said this but the reason they keep data centers cooler rather than warmer is component wear, servers will literally burn parts out faster. Plus if the air is 27 degrees inside the rack will be way way way higher, again burning components out which in turn cost a hell of a lot more money per year to replace and maintain against keeping the centers cooler (and ill be waiting for someone to tell me i am wrong.. this is the internet after all).
great video! great sources! =D
First vomment
Daniyal Khan Vomment?
Yuuko Aioi Vomit.
Comet
Icy what you did there
Daniyal Khan Vongratulations!
Raise the temperature in the datacenters? Servers run "just fine" at higher temperatures? It appears that you've never heard of MTTF (Mean Time To Failure), which decreases by a certain amount for each degree that the temperature goes up (along with air pressure, humidity, and other factors). Sci Show needs to stay out of IT conversations, unless you guys have some actual enterprise IT experts on staff to proofread and fact-check your scripts.
Giffy Guy what is the MTTF for servers?
many places replace they servers every couple of years, even when there is faults on them.
also, isn't some data centres using they wast energy for District heating?
One degree isn't going to make everything collapse in on itself. 27C is a little high, but if the temps don't go above that and are combined with other strategies, there's no reason why it shouldn't work. 15C doesn't sound unreasonable. Neither does 16C.
Giffy Guy Modern electronic runs fine at these higher temps over the course of their life, due lower power chips, and better heat dissipation. The reason why server are keep at lower temps, is it used to be problem back when machines ran much hotter, and IT guys haven't really updated their practices.
Giffy Guy Sounds like a pretty simple optimization problem to me.
cOmAtOrAn The problem with optimization problems is few people actually run them, resulting in a lot of people having some 'rule of thumb' they picked up and hold like a fact.
Some questions for +SciShow:
What does nano technology do and what could we use it for in the future?
How many different types of cells are there in the human body?
How did Alan Turing crack Enigma?
The more energy efficient we get the more uses we find, nullifying the savings. It's been ages but I read somewhere the total sum of power used to operate and connect smart phones was equivalent to a refrigerator - in each and everyone's pocket. Amusing as we've made refrigerators quite a bit more energy efficient since the 1980s. Or 90s. One of those.
We'll get there someday.
If anyone is curious, Emerson or Emerson Electric is a big Fortune 500 manufacturing company. They make all sorts of stuff, and their website is a little vague on what they actually do lol.
Cooling idea: either build underground, or run a fluid-filled pipe deep enough underground to shed heat and recirculate up to a radiator.
thatotherguy27 Building something underground that generates heat? How would that be smart lol.. Heat couldn't go anywhere: look at any mine.
About 10 feet down the temperature is a stable 55 Fahrenheit
Yeah till you put something that's warm between it. Look at an iglo... And look at the main problems mines and tunnles have nowadays whilest you are at it ;) Isolation is a bitch
***** Hmm, I highly doubt building an underground storage facility with those exchangers and exhausts would be very ecofriendly though. Oh and by the way: ever been on a subway in Spain? ;)
Awesome info...
I have been wondering this for so long.
1:01 {does some arithmetic} Wow, that's 24.5 doublings in 21 years.
Thanks, Moore's Law!
Virtualization is not used for energy efficiency. It is mainly used for resource efficiency. The reason being that virtualization adds more overhead than a ordinary server. So basically you will be more energy efficient if you get the appropriate server for the appropriate capacity. Especially in a data center where most of the resources are used for data storing and not service processing.
this video is 5 years old, it's 2020 and the mount of energy the internet uses has skyrocketed not just because of cloud storage and other services, but the energy used to do research, like with folding@home.
Hot and cold aisles are not a great solution. Vertical airflow is more efficient, gives better control of cooling to the person laying out the cabinet, and saves on floor space. Of course, it is also a feature that is only practical in custom built data centers due to the need for structurally secure drop floors.
Its true that server can run in a litle higher temperature, but a 'big increment' in temperature will cause the lifetime of the components to go down. Atough you don't need to replace the entire server if a component (like a hard disk) broke, when youre talking about 99,999% of eficiency the time you turn off the server to replace the disk and retrieve a backup is a problem. In fact in the 'ideal' data center a server is turned off only when its replaced. Virtualization and another 'hot plug' server technologies are reducing the aspects that i have mentioned but will take some time until we are free of those problems. But as he correctly pointed out... We have big scale gains if you compare with the situation of every small company having their own data center.
I love the way you first say "The cloud" almost with reverence
One easy solution, move data centers to cooler location such as iceland and use natural resources to cool down servers and transport heat to residence using interconnected pipe tunneling who are relying on heaters. Energy saving strategy.
Virtualization will play a huge part in reducing energy consumption in data centers.
You also can put servers in colder regions in the world such as Sweden (where I happen to live by the way…), that also saves energy :)
Yay to Hank for promoting energy conservation. The video was blurry for the first minute. ;)
My father used to work for Emerson, then he moved to a different job in a different state... This video was really interesting, as I basically am growing up (I'm still not an adult) around data centres and going in with my dad after hours when something goes wrong!
Some Datacenters are setup in colder parts of the world so that the natural cold air flow comes through huge fans directly into the DC. I think it's Google or Facebook that does this.
'' Pictures of your kid at the parc. '' That example was not REAALLY sensible, but why that when there's so many other things :P
The aisles one makes sense. I don't know why they didn't do that one from the beginning :/
New data centers are sometimes placed in cold locations.
Btw. kudos for using international units of measurement. :-)
I'd never said it...wow. Thank you guys. Very interesting and surprising! : )
0:34 took me a while to realize those were cabinets, not buildings.
They keep the rooms colder is so that they have more time to safely shutdown the equipment in the event of a cooling system failure. With millions invested in the hardware, they don't (shouldn't) mind using a bit extra power.
This is a really cool video! Thanks for gracing the random facts part of my brain!
Use the waste heat from servers to generate electricity that in turn powers the units that cool the servers.
The same principles of a turbocharger, but for data centers.
Think about it.
mwwhited
I never said jack shit about perpetual motion.
I've got more than a basic understanding of Thermodynamics.
My guess is that you have no idea how a turbo charger works?
mwwhited
Confirmed: You have no idea how a turbocharger works.
I never said the waste heat would run the servers.
I said the waste heat could be used to produce electricity to run the cooling fans, diminishing electricity costs.
You should really do some research before you make a bigger fool of yourself. My idea does not violate thermodynamics.
mwwhited
You don't need pressure to convert heat into electricity. There is a company that builds camp stoves that convert heat from the fire you're cooking on into electricity that can be used to charge a cellphone.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator
I never claimed that waste heat alone could power the cooling fans. It would simply increase efficiency, reducing power costs.
mwwhited
IBM already is:
www.extremetech.com/extreme/211008-ibm-wants-to-cool-data-centers-with-their-own-waste-heat
Dude, research. Do it.
mostly the issue is that they don't want to spend x amount more on a datacenter without knowing if it'll pay off or not, there are a few companies who have the funding to do that but frankly, those are few and far between.
Have you seen the price of renting a vps? for $5 a month you can have your own disposable virtual server, it's fucking insane.
On the cooling subject you could have a liquid cooling system similar to a radiator in a car. This can do the job of an a/c system through a relativity passive system.
I think the technical university Zurich uses water-cooled servers for their Bioinformatics institut. The water is then used to heat the building (at least in the colder seasons) ... as easy as that.
We just talked about virtualization in my Operating Systems class. It's a great way to save energy and I hope one day all servers utilize it.
Take the waste heat from the exhaust & use it to heat homes instead. Heat recycling is a cool idea, just needs to be perfected. No pun intended.
There are some interesting new cooling methods for data centers using just open air stuff.
Raise the temperature, raise it!
Looks like an optimum situation to use a Sterling motor "engine". Motors get energy from an outside source, an engine creates it's own energy.
i know of an ISP in the UK that has significant "off grid" infrastructure, i.e. it runs entirely from wind/solar power and batteries that last over 10 years .. The problem with a lot of data centres is the servers are often very inefficient . processors available to day produce a lot less heat but vendors still like to push power hungry older types. every watt of heat costs some watts of power to cool.
Can you give me a link? I would like to read about those.
Servers + Outerspace = A Win.
An idea for the next episode could be;
Is it possible to move a planet?
We do generate a lot of data!!!!! Just imagine the countless emails, and going to court where they record everything that is said, including a surveillance, its a hell lot of data!
Throughout the video I was wondering whether I was watching a SciShow educational video or an Emerson infomercial.
you forgot to account for all the seeders leaving their machines on overnight to seed... and the all miners that buy like a hundred of all the new gpus on the market, with each gpu consuming anywhere from 200 to 500w, running them 24/7.
Maybe moving the servers to a colder place on the planet would help, use the environment to cool down, also maybe the heat can be used to e.g. keep a building warm or produce electricity. And newer technology is getting more powerful and with less heat issues. Progress is in progress. :D
Actually they keep the temperatures low for a reason, the lower the temperature the longer lifespan of electronics in the server room(CPU,Ram GPU, HDD..)
You didn't answer the question in the title, the people have spoken and he wants a number!
While servers may be able to run fine at 27°C, the cooler a server is the longer the parts last. Heat the main killer of computer parts, so even if they can run at a bit hotter, they wont last as long as if they were kept cooler. That being said, it's possible that the energy cost to keep the place cool will end up adding more to the bill than replacing parts might. You'd need to do the calculations and tests to find out exactly what temperature is the most optimal money wise, and I'd imagine the data houses have already done that and 13°C is optimal, which is why most of them are kept that temperature. Or maybe they haven't, idk lol.
The best cooling solution I've seen is to shift the data centres to somewhere cold, ideally somewhere that has cheap hydro electricity and a need for low grade heat. I'm sure anyone reading this can think of places like that.
You did not mention that it is a lot more efficient to build the data centers where it is actually cold. Like some companies are doing in southern Sweden.
Apparently a large part of "the internet" is underneath MIT (a college in northeast US). Kinda cool, I guess.
A civilization can be measured by the level of energy it can access and create. The uptrend in the internet may just be one more thing that pushes our species towards greater development a a whole.
Well you could always just use water to cool those servers, like for example one of the northern European Countires has planned, they will have a Datacenter inside an old (Salt?)Mine and cool it using seawater. Also Google has Datacenters cooled with ice, so thats a thing.
Oh and btw i work for a company making Cooling Systems for said Datacenters, also excuse my bad grammer, German and stuffs :)
The "raise the temperature" solution isn't exactly the most practical. It sounds fine at first, but it's actually kind of dangerous for the equipment.
Much like altitude is life insurance for pilots, temperature decrease is the same for IT equipment. If the air conditioning units fail, then you have to get an H-Vac tech out there and someone to start shutting stuff down. Accounting for the worst case scenario it can take 30-40 minutes for one to respond.
I remember a time when this exact scenario happened at an office I worked at and the temperature of the server room went from about 20*C to 42*C in a matter of thirty minutes and was still climbing. Plastic labels/decals were peeling off on their own. Wasn't a good time.
Now bear in mind it was a small server room with a lot of equipment, so the airflow wasn't optimal. The situation in a properly configured server environment would not be as dramatic, but still possible.
There must be SOME way to use that heat to our advantage...