{"id":6091,"date":"2009-11-20T15:50:06","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T23:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/20\/the-future-of-the-data-center-is-green-takeaways-from-wiredre-data-center-event\/"},"modified":"2021-08-13T03:14:44","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T10:14:44","slug":"the-future-of-the-data-center-is-green-takeaways-from-wiredre-data-center-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/the-future-of-the-data-center-is-green-takeaways-from-wiredre-data-center-event\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future of the Data Center Is Green: Takeaways From the WiredRE Data Center Event"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image222\" src=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/blog-green-datacenter.jpg\" alt=\"Green Datacenter\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"bzdropcap\">What do the following have in common: Google providing search, Coca-Cola operating its systems to track inventory, and Backblaze backing up your data? The computers that handle all of this live in data centers. And those data centers use power\u2014lots of it.<\/p>\n<p>In the U.S. alone there are over 20,000 data centers\u2014each of which houses thousands or tens of thousands of servers. Combined, these data centers make up 3% of all U.S. energy consumption (not just electricity). That&#8217;s more than the entire domestic air fleet.<\/p>\n<p>So, when I went to an event on Wednesday called:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110206081216\/http:\/\/www.wiredre.com:80\/colocation-data-center-real-estate\/2009\/10\/data-center-dilemma-cloud-colocation-data-center-seminars\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE DATA CENTER: CLOUD, COLOCATION, &amp; DATA CENTER REAL ESTATE<\/a><br \/>\nit should be no surprise that the focus was on power, power, power.<\/p>\n<p>And lest you think this is people getting wrapped up in the green movement or just jumping on a marketing trend\u2014let me dissuade you. Data centers in the U.S. spend $23 billion a year on electricity according to KC Mares of <a href=\"http:\/\/megawattconsulting.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">MegaWatt Consulting<\/a>. In fact, electricity can often cost over 50% of the purchase price of a server over its lifetime. Minor improvements can have massive implications not only on global warming but also company bottom lines.<\/p>\n<p>Mares provided a fascinating overview of innovations and experiments that operators of data centers and the companies building out large server deployments are pursuing. Some examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>VFDs: Variable frequency drives to maintain the speed of blower fans that adjust to need rather than spinning at a constant rate.<\/li>\n<li>Natural cooling: Using outside air and fans rather than air conditioning to keep data centers cool, it turns out most servers are perfectly happy running at temperatures much higher than what data centers attempt to keep them at.<\/li>\n<li>Shorter cooling regions: Having air flow almost directly around a server in the process of cooling it rather than through the entire building; shorter distances mean less air friction and less energy spent moving it around.<\/li>\n<li>Eliminating UPS systems: Getting rid of the backup power systems and assuming servers will go down&#8230;and having <a href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/cloud-storage\/solutions\/backup-and-archive\">backup servers<\/a> or data centers instead.<\/li>\n<li>Using 480 volts: Higher voltage means lower amperage and thus less heat loss and higher efficiency. More of today&#8217;s server systems are capable of handling this voltage.<\/li>\n<li>Higher efficiency power supplies: Switching to 90% efficient power supplies on servers rather than using 70% or 80% ones. These are more expensive upfront but can still pay off fairly quickly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A number of these items pay for themselves in a couple months and then generate savings ongoing from then on. Mares has a variety of information on his site and <a href=\"http:\/\/megawattconsulting.com\/blog\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do the following have in common: Google providing search, Coca-Cola operating its systems to track inventory, and Backblaze backing up your data? The computers that handle all of this live in data centers. And those data centers use power\u2014lots of it. In the U.S. alone there are over 20,000 data centers\u2014each of which houses&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/the-future-of-the-data-center-is-green-takeaways-from-wiredre-data-center-event\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Future of the Data Center Is Green: Takeaways From the WiredRE Data Center Event<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[131,13,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backblaze-bits","category-events","category-techbytes","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Future of the Data Center Is Green: Takeaways From the WiredRE Data Center Event<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What do the following have in common: Google providing search, Coca-Cola operating its systems to track inventory, and Backblaze backing up your data? The\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/the-future-of-the-data-center-is-green-takeaways-from-wiredre-data-center-event\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Future of the Data Center Is Green: Takeaways From the WiredRE Data Center Event\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What do the following have in common: Google providing search, Coca-Cola operating its systems to track inventory, and Backblaze backing up your data? The\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/the-future-of-the-data-center-is-green-takeaways-from-wiredre-data-center-event\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage &amp; Cloud Backup\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/backblaze\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-11-20T23:50:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-08-13T10:14:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/blog-green-datacenter.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"551\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"304\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Gleb Budman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@backblaze\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@backblaze\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Gleb Budman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Future of the Data Center Is Green: Takeaways From the WiredRE Data Center Event","description":"What do the following have in common: Google providing search, Coca-Cola operating its systems to track inventory, and Backblaze backing up your data? 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Gleb has served as a member of our board of directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021. Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies.","url":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/author\/gleb\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/blog-green-datacenter.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}