No April Fools’ joke this: Google shares its data center details
Apr 2, 2009 Green Architecture, Green Technologies
Google operates perhaps the largest number of data centers today. Their energy efficiency is critical for the company, as it directly relates to the costs of running them. Efficiency is important not just because improving it cuts power consumption costs, but also because inefficiencies typically produce waste heat that requires yet more expense in cooling.
Google data centers have long been known to be amongst the most efficient, but their designs were secret. But finally, everyone got a peek at them at the recently held “Data Center Efficiency Summit”, where the company discussed the innards of one of its data centers and custom web servers — all in a bid to promote energy efficiency.
The data centers have 1AAA shipping containers, sporting 1106 custom built servers each. Interestingly, each of the servers has its own 12-volt UPS. This pushes energy efficiency to 99.9% , as opposed to a standard centralized UPS setup which at best would only score 95%!
The custom built Google server was 3.5 inches thick–2U, or 2 rack units, in data center parlance. It had two processors, two hard drives, and eight memory slots mounted on a motherboard built by Gigabyte. Google uses x86 processors from both AMD and Intel. It also focuses on data center issues such as power distribution, cooling, and ensuring hot and cool air don’t intermingle.
Google has been designing two of its new data centers in Belgium to work without chillers, which will improve the PUE metric of these facilities. PUE is an emerging standard promoted by The Green Grid and others in the data center industry to provide a consistent way to measure the ratio of power delivered to IT equipment versus the total amount of power used by the facility. PUE allows data center managers to calculate how much power is driving the actual IT equipment versus non-IT elements such as cooling and lighting.
While industry standard values near about 2, Google claims its six company-built data centers had an average PUE of 1.21. That benchmark improved to 1.16 in the fourth quarter of 2008, and hit 1.15 percent in the first quarter of 2009. The most efficient individual data center has a PUE of 1.12.
Few more details at CNET.
Tags: data centers, Google, PUC, servers
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