[108393] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Google's PUE
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marshall Eubanks)
Wed Oct 1 18:10:44 2008
From: Marshall Eubanks <tme@multicasttech.com>
To: deepak@ai.net
In-Reply-To: <48E3EF51.9050708@ai.net>
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 18:10:37 -0400
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Oct 1, 2008, at 5:44 PM, Deepak Jain wrote:
>
>> I am going to attempt to determine our PUE, using the methodology
>> described in the Google paper. One must figure that "in the spirit
>> it was intended" has to factor in the natural gas consumption,
>> otherwise my PUE would be about 0.1. :)
>
> If you generate energy for your microturbine from a land fill (free
> methane gas) your PUE would be nearly zero. Obviously PUE can be
> skewed and shouldn't be considered as a single metric for anything
> other than a press release.
>
> I would also suggest that Alex shouldn't hold is breath on more
> details. The details provided are interesting, but without context.
Indeed. If they would refuse a visit to Cory Doctorow writing for
Nature, I don't think we should hold our breath at
all :
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080903/full/455016a.html
" It doesn't disclose the dimensions or capacity of those data
centres. Nature wanted me to visit one for this piece, but a highly
placed Googler told me that no one from the press had ever been
admitted to a Google data centre; it would require a decision taken at
the board level. Which is too bad."
Regards
Marshall
>
>
> (Its like:
>
> "Hi, we filter our river water to evaporate it." But are they
> calculating the cost of all that contaminated material and its
> disposal? The blowdown on their cooling towers would have to be many
> times more hazardous than normal, and may require additional
> treatment to make it safe to release).
>
> Is any math being done to decide whether free river/water-side
> economization is more important (financially/environmentally) than
> cheap energy inputs?
>
> If rather than density, we REDUCE density and build very large foot
> print data centers that can use ambient air (I've heard rumors that
> MSFT is using 85 degree air [cool side] in New Mexico) we could get
> to PUE numbers that were nearly ideal (hot air rises, natural
> convection, no fans, just PDU overhead, etc).
>
> Except where it impacts the bottom line, this all seems more like a
> fashion show than an actual business plan.
>
> Deepak Jain
>
