Commodity Hardware, Part II

Related to this earlier post:

The EPA recently released a report to Congress “on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency“.

You’ll note the Historical Trends scenario in Figure ES-1 (page 13) showing that if Data Centers continue on “business as usual” power consumption trends for the next four years we’ll hit an annual electricity use of 120+ billion kWh/year.  Yes, that’s 120 billion with a “b”, or about five times the energy consumption required to power data centers in 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom.  Given the fact that electricity costs will be rising, we’re talking some serious motivation to organizations to cut down cluster power consumption per unit of processing power.