Overall Data Center Growth to Kill Any Green Savings - By Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jan 21 2011)

1. 

   If you expected to the world's carbon footprint to take a big reduction in 2011 due to all the chit-chat over green data center building, forget it.  The total growth of data centers over the next three years is just going to steamroller  any projected savings due to virtualization, better green practices, and the purchase of green-er energy.

   I hate to be in such a dour mood at the beginning of 2011, but I'm looking at a piece in the The Register discussing Intel's fourth quarter 2011 financial results.  Intel President/CEO Paul Otellini told Wall Street analysts that the company is seeing "pretty consistent growth" in chips -- the heart of server hardware -- and the company believes that information shuffling around the Internet is going to grow over the next five years from 245 exabytes (2010) to over 1,000 exabytes.

   Intel's Data Center Group posted significant growth both sequentially from Q3 2010 (up 15 percent) and from the same quarter last year -- up 24 percent.  All of Intel's other product lines were flat. For 2011, Intel expects its overall growth in revenues to run about 10 percent in 2011, with its new "Sandy bridge" sever chips with anywhere from four to eight cores to ship in the third quarter of this year.

   Now if Intel has seen significant server growth in the past and there's reasonable expectations of growth in the future, the net-net here is that there are lots more shiny new server boxes that are going to purchased to serve the growing and anticipated needs of cloud computing -- yes, supporting all those iPads and forthcoming Android tablets -- a move by businesses to tap into compute resources on-demand rather than build in-house, and worldwide health care needs to crunch numbers for better medical care. 

   And that's before we start factoring in the growth of server farms in emerging markets.  IBM and France Telecom are putting big bucks into Africa and other markets as "greenfield" opportunities emerge from a combination of backhaul fiber, new wireless buildouts, and higher-speed/lower-cost satellite networks for backhaul.   Just thinking about the developing world needs alone makes me want to hit the Gates Foundation over the head, grab a couple billion in funding, and throw it at Bloom Energy to build a couple of factories worth of production in Africa!

   Is there a way out of this mess?  There is, but the solution is to crank up more "green" power.  Conservation of power and getting more compute work per watt are all well and good, but the total amount of data that is going to get crunched over the next three to five years is only headed steadily upward. If reducing carbon is the meta-goal, then we need to start cranking more green power and adding more green power, like, yesterday.

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