Europe

Given its current fiscal straits, Europe exemplifies the present overall strength of the data center market. The continent is currently struggling to resolve its crushing debt load and to determine whether it will continue as a consolidated entity (the EU) or as separate states. A breakup of the EU may well be in the offing, as CNBC reports (“Stocks Post Loss on Greece, S&P at 3-Month Low”): “‘I think people need to prepare for the eventual removal of Greece from the EU and investors are getting ahead of that before they’re forced to,’ said Matthew McCormick, vice president and portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Investment Counsel.” Greece may be the first—but not last—nation to leave or be booted from the union.

But despite these economic and political problems, the data center industry is still seeing growth in this region. In the colocation sector, service provider Interxion reported good news for the first quarter of this year, according to DatacenterDynamics (“Interxion reports strong Q1 results despite Europe’s economy”): Interxion’s CEO, David Ruberg, stated, “Recurring revenue increased by more than 4% over the quarter ended December 31, 2011, and strong bookings in the quarter reflect a continued healthy market for our services, despite sustained economic weakness in Europe.”

Furthermore, even though Europe is in the midst of a financial crisis, possibly spilling over to a political one, portions of it remain relatively low-risk locations for new data centers, according to Cushman & Wakefield and hurleypalmerflatt. The Data Centre Risk Index 2012 ranks the U.K. and Germany as second and third, respectively, for lowest-risk regions to build data centers (behind the U.S.). This report examines risks such as political instability, energy costs, potential for natural disasters and other factors that could endanger a data center operation.

Given the increasing reliance of western economies on IT services provided by data centers, the real estate market will likely withstand minor economic or even political reorganization in Europe. Of course, should the economic problems result in a more serious situation, all bets are off.

Nordic Region

Within Europe, the Nordic countries are a growing market all their own. Offering a cool climate (great for free cooling to reduce energy consumption) and (in some areas) abundant renewable energy, these nations are an increasingly attractive (and, concomitantly, less risky) option for companies looking to build new facilities. On the 2012 Data Centre Risk Index, Iceland ranked an impressive number four (even despite its recent volcanic activity that shut down many European airports); Sweden ranked eighth, followed by Finland at nine and Norway at twelve.

Nevertheless, even though the region has seen expansion of the data center market this year, not everything works in its favor: according to DatacenterDynamics (“Nordics make strong entrance in data center risk index”), “Norway…ranked as the most politically stable country and also measured a high availability of natural resources and renewable energy sources but its high cost of labour and relatively low connectivity pushed it down on the list.” Iceland was cited for political instability and a lack of bandwidth capacity as working against it. Overall, however, the Nordic countries are the rising star of the European region.

Asia

Asia represents the area of greatest expansion in the data center market, as the Data Center Journal reported (“Fastest-Growing Data Center Market in 2012”). In particular, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore demonstrate the strongest growth, but other areas are also growing. Asian nations do not yet match western nations—particularly the U.S.—in overall development, but their large populations (particularly in China and India) and growing demand for IT services are driving demand for data center space. On Cushman & Wakefield and hurleypalmerflatt’s Data Centre Risk Index for 2012, Hong Kong placed highest among Asian regions, ranking seventh. South Korea ranked 13, Thailand 15 and Singapore 17. China and India, despite their growth potential, ranked near the bottom of the list: 26^th place for China and 29^th for India out of 30 evaluated nations.

Despite the risks, China in particular is seeing growth, partly as companies from other nations (like major corporations in the U.S., including IBM and Google) build facilities in hopes of tapping the emerging markets in the region.

South America

South America is another region with mixed conditions, like Asia. Despite its own significant growth, the region poses many risks to companies building data centers. Brazil, the only South American nation represented in the Data Centre Risk Index scored at the bottom of the heap. DatacenterDynamics (“Report: Brazil is riskiest data center location”) notes that although “the report’s authors based their judgment on more than a dozen parameters, high energy cost and difficulty of doing business stood out as key risk factors in operating data centers in Brazil.” Other risk factors, such as political instability and high corporate taxes, also weighed the nation to the bottom of the rankings. Nevertheless, Brazil will likely lead in growth in this region, according to the Cushman & Wakefield and hurleypalmerflatt report. In addition, Mexico will also see significant growth (the nation only ranked a few slots above Brazil according to risk). Although Mexico is technically not geographically a part of South America, it may be best lumped with that region.

Middle East and Africa

The only country outside the above-mentioned regions that ranks in the Data Centre Risk Index is the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar, which ranked a surprising sixth place, just behind Canada. Needless to say, few nations in this region represent prime data center real estate, owing to political instability, ongoing wars and other factors. Populations in these regions are demanding IT services, and opportunities are available, but pending some relief from strife (particularly in the Middle East, but also in some African nations), growth will be restrained.

Data Center Market Conclusions

Growth in the data center real estate market is still strong in North America, as businesses and consumers continue to demand more and more services. Europe, despite is economic difficulties (and the U.S. isn’t far behind), is nevertheless seeing growth as well. Asia, concomitant with its emerging markets, is the growth leader in the data center sector (meaning certain portions of it—it is a huge region). But these conditions tend to indicate that the data center market overall is simply in its growth stage. Eventually, growth will level out as rising demand meets the ceiling of resource (particularly energy) availability.

Photo courtesy of Martyn Wright

Any build-versus-outsource decision could be viewed through the prism of core competence-increasing performance and organizational delivery through a focus on its core value activities. Unfortunately, in the past, multiple extraneous factors muddied the perspective. The key difference is that when an activity is core and business critical, it will receive top-level attention and focus. An IT team’s time should be dedicated to the activities that provide a strategic advantage to the enterprise and allow resources to be focused only on those key areas. The decision to outsource a data center requires careful examination of options at a strategic level from a business vision perspective and a thorough tactical evaluation on an operating plane involving asset inventories, facility requirement estimations and budgetary considerations.

Outsourcing Versus Building a Data Center

Advantages of Outsourcing Your Data Center

Many organizations—whether small, medium or large and across various industry verticals—have realized that outsourcing their data centers is the best way to align IT and business in the most cost-effective manner. Many important business benefits are associated with outsourcing: organizations can gain higher operational and financial efficiencies, enjoy proactive monitoring and management of their hosted IT infrastructure, and increase customer satisfaction, all while staying focused on their core business areas.

The benefits not only include protection of IT infrastructure from technology obsolescence, but they also allow maximum freedom and flexibility in daily IT operations, while simultaneously lowering financial and operational overheads. Benefits include:

• Align to changing business needs
• Compliance with corporate governance
• Cost advantage
• Custom solutions
• Scalable IT operations to meet growing business demand
• Access to latest technology
• Business continuity
• Accountability through SLAs
• Access to skilled expertise
• Energy-efficient data centers
• High availability and reliability
• Realize the true potential of IT—not just manage costs

What Is Being Outsourced?

Typical areas delegated to managed and outsourced datacenter providers include:

• Trouble ticketing and help desk
• End-user support and infrastructure operations
• Hardware maintenance and network operations
• Monitoring and management (server, systems and so on)
• Security
• HVAC
• Disaster recovery, storage management and backup (power, data)
• Full functionality and support of all elements within the data center

The TCO Advantage

Predicting and measuring total cost of ownership (TCO) for the physical infrastructure of network rooms and data centers is required for return-on-investment (ROI) analysis and other business decision processes. In addition, an understanding of the cost drivers of TCO provides insight into opportunities to control costs.

Organizations today will need to assess the benefits of a build or buy decision on the basis of the impact of IT enablement, business continuity, process excellence, privacy and compliance requirements—in line with board vision and cost compulsions. And as businesses look further afield at outsourcing or out-locating their data centers, they need to carefully evaluate the providers in various geographies. The spectrum of decision factors will range from management mandates to energy efficiency.

Related Links: Data centers in India, Internet data center, Data Center in Chennai, Data Center in Mumbai

About the Author

Jayabalan Subramanian is the Chief Technology Officer and cofounder of Netmagic Solutions Pvt. Ltd. He is recognized in the industry as an expert on internetworking and has consulted with leading organizations including BAFL, BPL, Bharti, Worldtel, and Hathway Internet, among others.

Photo courtesy of Mark Hillary

Hydrogen: A Storage Medium

To get a good idea of the basic properties of hydrogen, just think of the Hindenburg: the giant German airship (dirigible) that plunged to the Earth in flames in 1937. The airship gained its lift from hydrogen gas: a very light (i.e., not dense), inflammable gas. Although hydrogen is plentiful (think water, hydrocarbons and so on), it is seldom found in its diatomic elemental form (H₂). So, unlike coal, for example, hydrogen is not a readily obtainable fuel source. It can, however, be used as a means of storing or transporting energy—and this is its primary use. As a DatacenterDynamics interview with Siemens (“Using hydrogen to store energy”) notes, “Hydrogen is a multi-purpose energy carrier… Also, hydrogen as a storage medium is a concept that has already been tested in several domains.”

Hydrogen is thus in some ways like gasoline: it is simply a chemical that certain types of equipment can convert into energy and various byproducts. But it’s the nature of these byproducts that makes hydrogen appealing.

Clean Energy

Under ideal conditions, the burning of hydrogen (think Hindenburg) produces water and heat as its only products, making its use in internal combustion engines preferable (in this sense, at least) to fossil fuels. But even more useful would be a process that converts hydrogen more directly into energy and water—enter the fuel cell. A fuel cell splits hydrogen into protons and electrons, creating an electrical current. The protons combine with oxygen in a catalytic environment to yield water. What more could a data center ask for? (For a simple animation depicting the operating principles of a fuel cell, see the YouTube video Hydrogen Fuel Cell.)

The fuel cell produces electricity as long as hydrogen fuel is supplied to it. Its characteristics from a physical standpoint are nearly ideal: electricity on demand with virtually no production of carbon compounds or other emissions. Because hydrogen can be stored, it represents energy that can be consumed as needed, not necessarily right away (as in the case of solar or wind power). Sounds great—but as always, there are some caveats.

Getting Your Hands on Hydrogen

As mentioned above, hydrogen does not exist naturally in a manner that makes it readily available as a fuel. Practically speaking, it must be produced from other materials, such as water or fossil fuels. The two main processes are electrolysis of water, whereby an electric current splits water molecules into elemental oxygen (O₂) and hydrogen (H₂), and steam reforming of hydrocarbons. In each case, energy input of some kind is required, either in the form of electrical energy to electrolyze water or in the form of stored chemical energy in the form of a hydrocarbon. Electrolysis is one means of storing energy from renewable resources like solar or wind, avoiding entirely the need for mined resources like natural gas or coal. Naturally, the efficiency of these processes varies depending on the particulars of the process, the equipment used and so forth.

Alternative processes for generating hydrogen are under investigation—such as biomass production—but these processes do not yet generate hydrogen practically on large scales. Whatever the generation approach, however, the gas must then be stored for transport or for later use.

Storing Hydrogen—A Slight Problem

Hydrogen is an inflammable gas (again, think Hindenburg), but it is not necessarily more dangerous than, say, gasoline vapors. The main problem with storing hydrogen is that compared with other fuels—such as gasoline—it contains much less energy per unit volume (even though it contains more energy per unit mass). Practical (in terms of size) storage requires that the hydrogen be compressed, preferably into liquid form for maximum density. And herein lies the main difference relative to liquid fossil fuels: the container not only holds an inflammable material, but it is also pressurized, creating its own unique challenges and dangers. Fuel leakage into the atmosphere is more problematic, and some environmentalists even claim that this leakage, were hydrogen used on a large scale, could have harmful repercussions on the environment.

Even in liquid form, hydrogen still lags other fuels in energy stored per unit volume. Thus, when implemented in automobiles, for instance, fuel-cell-powered automobiles lack the range of conventional gasoline-powered vehicles. And then there’s the cost of fuel cell technology, which is currently prohibitive. Claims of falling fuel cell prices are dubious, given the unsustainable subsidies from the federal government and some states (like California).

Hydrogen for Data Centers

Apple’s Maiden data center is the highest-profile facility implementing fuel cell technology. According to NewsObserver.com (“Apple plans nation’s biggest private fuel cell energy project at N.C. data center”), Apple will generate hydrogen from natural gas and will employ 24 fuel cell modules. The project is slated for an output of 4.8 megawatts—much less than the data center’s total power consumption, but still a sizable output.

The use of natural gas to generate hydrogen still creates carbon emissions, so this project won’t satisfy everyone (although whether carbon dioxide is as bad as its current politicized reputation would suggest is hardly certain). Nevertheless, like Apple’s large solar farm at the same site, this hydrogen fuel cell project will be a good test of the practicability of hydrogen in the context of data centers.

Hydrogen: Will Most Companies Care?

Jumping into the power generation arena is not something most companies (particularly small and midsize companies) can afford to do—let alone have an interest in doing. So, pending availability of some affordable, prepackaged hydrogen fuel cell system, don’t expect most companies to deploy such a project at their data center sites. Currently, large companies like Apple and Google are among the few dabbling in energy in addition to their primary business. Most companies will, no doubt, prefer to simply plug their data centers into the local utility and let someone else worry about where the energy comes from—these companies wish to focus on their primary business interests.

Conclusion: What Exactly Does Hydrogen Mean for the Data Center?

Hydrogen fuel cells offer some major improvements in controlling emissions, and hydrogen delivers some benefits as a means of storing and transporting energy. But fuel cell technology lacks the economic efficiency of other, traditional power sources, so it has a ways to go before it can attain the status of coal or nuclear, or even smaller-scale sources like solar. Furthermore, the applicability of hydrogen (as such) to data centers is unclear. Power backup seems the most likely present candidate for application of hydrogen and fuel cells. In time, Apple’s project may demonstrate the practicality of electricity via natural gas as another possibility. Until then, however, the industry must wait to see whether this technology matures—and becomes economically feasible.

Photo courtesy of Zero Emission Resource Organisation

The Global Issue: Population and Industrial Development Exceeding Existing Infrastructure

The global statistics are in, and the findings are eye opening, as Figure 1 outlines. Over the next two decades, demand for electricity is forecasted to grow by 40 percent in the U.S. alone. Increased demand is most dramatic in Asia, averaging 4.7 percent per year until 2030. And while Africa accounts for over one-sixth of the world’s population, the country only generates 4 percent of global electricity. As a country, India loses 28 percent of the electricity it carries. In South America, demand for electricity is projected to double over the next few years, outstripping generation capacity and the aging infrastructure, thus causing increasing power disturbances.

Figure 1: The global issue: population and industrial development is growing more rapidly than the existing power infrastructure can handle.

This exponential growth means increased stress on the grid, which in turn means more strain on individual electronic items, reducing lifespan, lowering reliability and affecting everyday life.

Electronics Power Protection Landscape

Today’s electronics are pervasive, and the majority of equipment is deployed with insufficient protection, resulting in damage from power grid disturbances, which are surprisingly frequent and destructive. All electronic equipment has two things in common: it needs power to operate, and it is significantly affected by power interruptions. Digital electronics are much more susceptible to glitches, and the evolution of electronics equipment has opened the possibility for more power-related issues. According to Electronic Power Research Institute (EPRI), the consequences of these daily loss-generating disturbances has been called “the most important concern affecting most industrial and commercial customers,” as they cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually to businesses in the United States alone.

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), enterprise companies, data centers and even consumers, until now, have relied on either UPS or surge protection to shield equipment from grid fluctuations, thinking that these devices adequately protect electronics from damage. UPSs offer protection and effectiveness from a technical standpoint by isolating electronics from the grid and powering them by battery. The downside, however, is that UPSs are expensive for most applications and too large to integrate into electronics. Thus, users either choose not to protect their equipment at all or turn to inexpensive surge protection or power strips that only shield electronics from less than one percent of damaging power disturbances. One of the greatest limitations of power strips is their inability to handle high voltage surges, making them practically useless in terms of electronics protection. In addition to risks from an already unstable power grid, digital electronics are microprocessor-based, leaving them susceptible to power fluctuations.

Evolution of Electronics

Although the grid globally remains unreliable, electronic equipment that defines modern life has become highly sophisticated, using a substantial amount of energy—with each new generation of devices more hungry than the last. In addition to its energy consumption, the majority of this equipment is being deployed with insufficient power protection and suffers from an extreme amount of power grid activity that is costing the industry an estimate of tens of billions of dollars annually in lost data, materials and productivity[1].

Grid Disturbances & Fluctuations

Increasing demand for electricity is putting enormous pressure on a grid not equipped to support such heavy usage. In a CNN article[2] regarding the rise in U.S. electricity blackouts, experts on the nation’s electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers. Research performed at the University of Minnesota indicates that over the past two decades, blackouts have increased 124 percent, yet blackouts are merely one of the ways in which the power grid affects connectivity. Electronics are affected by an infinite number of uncontrollable variables ranging from voltage surges and spikes to voltage sags, power outages, overvoltages and brownouts. Even a one-second outage can damage equipment and disrupt operations to the point where labor becomes impaired as systems are reset and brought back online.

In addition to power outages, even a minor voltage fluctuation or other disruption of the electrical signal can wreak havoc. Research indicates surges are not as severely damaging compared with the frequent and potentially destructive disturbances emitted from power grids. Far greater damage can be the result of voltage sags, brownouts, overvoltage conditions and power outages, which may have grave consequences as they relate to reliability and overall lifespan. Electrical disturbances of all types occur frequently, as Figure 2 highlights, and although we may not see an immediate effect such as a blackout, disturbances on the grid can still have lasting implications on our devices.

Figure 2: The inherently chaotic power grid is caustic to connected electronics and affected by an infinite number of uncontrollable variables.

Mounting Costs

The Consortium for Electric Infrastructure to Support a Digital Society commissioned a study in 2009 to obtain a definitive estimate of the direct costs of power disturbances to U.S. businesses. The study sought to quantify the cost of brief outages—for example, outages of one second or a couple of minutes long—unlike previous studies that have confined their analysis to lengthier outages of one hour or longer even though shorter outages are more common and can cause data loss and damage to industrial equipment. The study revealed the following:

• The average cost of a one-second outage among industrial and digital-economy firms is $1,477, versus an average cost of $2,107 for a three-minute outage and $7,795 for a one-hour outage.
• Digital-economy establishments report that 49 percent of the outages they experience last less than three minutes.
• Add all that up and the U.S. economy is losing between $104 billion and $164 billion each year to outages.

Additionally, a study by EPRI from 2005 suggests that the cost to the North American industry of production stoppages caused by voltage sags now exceeds $250 billion per year.

Wide Range of Industries Feel the Impact

The grid is relied on by a wide variety of industries ranging from consumer devices including laptops and televisions to sophisticated medical equipment. All of these industries use power to function and are affected differently by an unreliable power source.

Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics, like all electronics, are vulnerable to power-related glitches such as equipment lock ups and resets, service calls for unknown stoppages and modem problems. According to a report by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and Business Monitor International (BMI), the average U.S. household has 24 consumer electronics products, contributing to the growth in the consumer electronics devices market, which is expected to increase from $253.5 billion in 2011 to $322.9 billion by 2015. The latest projected figures from GfK Digital World, produced in partnership with Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), reveal global spending on consumer technology devices will surpass $1 trillion in 2012 for the first time. This is an increase of 5 percent over 2011’s figure of $993 billion. Consumer electronics devices range from TVs and personal devices to laptops, smartphones and audio equipment, and the industry as a whole can be segmented into entertainment, productivity and communications categories. In addition, consumer electronics accounts for 15 percent of global residential electricity consumption. This continued massive growth of digital electronics creates the possibility for additional power-related issues.

Data Centers on the Rise

Beyond consumer devices, more than ever, companies are moving IT infrastructure to data centers. Emerson, a networking provider who recently commissioned a study on the global data center phenomenon, revealed that there are over 509,000 data centers of varying sizes across the globe. These data centers combined accommodate the 1.2 trillion gigabytes of data created every day. In addition, despite stalled growth during the recession, IDC estimates approximately $22 billion will be spent on new data center development worldwide this year alone. Although downtime may be extremely low at data centers, damaging power disturbances are a very common, costly occurrence. To make matters worse, according to a data center report in 2010, problems with UPS equipment and configuration are the most frequently cited cause of data center outages. As a result, there is a growing movement to discover and implement a solution to add additional protection for these electronic assets without incurring massive cost, size and service requirements.

Invaluable Medical Technology

The need for reliable power goes beyond consumer electronics and data centers; another example is the global medical technology market. The medical device industry is large, intensely competitive and highly innovative, with annual worldwide sales in 2009 exceeding $220 billion according to Zacks Equity Research. A study performed five years ago by the U.S. International Trade Commission discovered that the United States, EU and Japan together account for approximately 90 percent of the global production and consumption of medical devices. The study also discovered that the U.S. medical device industry is the most competitive in the world, having been recognized for its ability to continually design, develop and place medical devices in U.S. and foreign markets. When improving the reliability of technology and services for the medical field, it’s critical for manufacturers and electronic equipment designers to remember the complexity of today’s digitally advanced world, which is largely affected by the power grid. If medical equipment malfunctions, it can have an immediate impact on patients, doctors and nurses. Given the sheer importance and monetary value, it’s necessary to understand the significance of protecting this equipment from power disturbances. The current solutions in place are expensive to acquire, costly to maintain and increasingly difficult and expensive to dispose of when replaced. Owing to these limitations, electronic equipment serving the medical industry is either protected at too great a cost or not protected at all.

A Solution: A New Approach in Power Protection Technology

New technology developed by Innovolt provides electronics power protection technology designed to guard against damage from 99.5 percent of power interruptions and is accessible to and effective for all electronics, regardless of size. This technology manages the impact of power disturbances and effectively increases the lifespan, reliability and efficiency of electronics equipment. According to Innovolt, companies that have deployed its technology have seen a decrease in service calls on protected equipment.

Innovolt has developed an intelligent electronics protection platform that in comparison with traditional surge protection and filtering technologies is a cost-effective, viable and proven long-term option for electronics protection. Similar to UPS systems, the technology provides immunity from grid and line disturbances, yet with a greater success rate, increased functional form-factor and more affordable design. Fortune Global 500 OEMs including Ricoh and Toshiba as well as other companies including Konica Minolta, ECi OMD and Katun have been quick to adopt Innovolt’s technology platform, a move that signifies the critical need for electronics equipment protection.

Electronic disturbances can occur at any time, without warning. With risks such as decreased profitability, productivity and customer satisfaction, businesses and consumers cannot afford to risk leaving their electronics unprotected. As we continue investing in new technology, we must understand the severity and implications of exposing our costly investments before it is too late. Innovolt’s ultimate future goal for electronics protection is to improve performance, reliability and longevity of equipment and reduce the number of service calls.

About the Author

Jeff Spence joined Innovolt as President and COO in 2010 after more than 15 years in executive and corporate development roles growing worldwide companies in the energy, finance, telecommunications and technology sectors across five continents and dozens of countries. In addition to his leadership roles with Innovolt, Spence continues to consult to the industry regarding sales, corporate finance, technology, business incubation and international business development. He is an active speaker across multiple industries and disciplines, having appeared at high-profile conferences including Comdex, Networld+Interop, The Homeland Security Summit, and the International Autobody Congress & Exposition (NACE). In addition, Spence has counseled policy groups including the United Nations, the European Union, and a host of other government and business groups on subjects ranging from economic development, entrepreneurialism, sales and marketing to government intervention and monetary policy.

South Carolina Tries to Lure Tech Companies

House of Representatives and Senate have approved elimination of the sales tax on electricity for data centers involving an investment of more than $50 million and 25 employees, according to HeraldOnline.com (“SC House OKs tax break for data centers”). The tax exemption would also extend to computer-related purchases such as servers and software. The bill was amended by the House to limit the scope of the tax breaks to companies currently in the state, but it is likely to pass in its amended form in the Senate as well, at which point it would go to the governor for approval.

Many states, suffering under debts and deficits and seeing little hope of relief in a stagnant economy, are looking to the data center industry as a means of buoying their fiscal prospects. Data centers are a symbol of technology, and although they generally do not involve many jobs (often less than 100, even at a large facility), they are large projects—ranging into the billions of dollars in some cases. Some governments are encouraging data center construction in hopes that these facilities will “seed” further development, leading ultimately to increased revenue and economic progress. These governments are making a down payment through lost revenue (tax incentives) on the assumption that the returns will be much greater in the long term.

South Carolina offers similar benefits relative to North Carolina, but it has been passed by for a number of large data center construction projects—and the state government believes this is the result of a tax disadvantage. The new legislation is intended to remedy this situation.

States Picking Economic Winners?

One potential complaint about tax incentives for data centers (or for any particular industry) is that it amounts to states—or whatever the government level—picking certain sectors to support at the expense of others. Although a tax break for one industry doesn’t necessarily reflect on the taxes of another industry, it does give the former an advantage. A counterargument is that other sectors—such as manufacturing—are already waning in the U.S., so giving tax breaks to certain industries (as opposed to, say, an across-the-board tax cut) doesn’t really do any significant harm. In fact, it is just investment in the future.

HeraldOnline.com notes that in the case of South Carolina, “The result, lawmakers hope, is companies like Facebook, Apple and Google will build S.C. data centers, which some view as the successor to the state’s disappearing textile industry and a symbol of the changing economy.” Many manufacturing industries are seeing a similar gloomy future in the U.S. as they move overseas to nations like China.

Data Center Industry Burgeoning, But It Won’t Help States

Many states are still seeking to remedy their debt problems by finding new revenue sources—meaning more taxes, which does nothing to spur the economy. But this is simply a reflection of the same policy at a national level, which seeks to maintain government growth without consideration for the effect that it has on the economy. (Of course, an occasional stimulus is granted in an attempt to encourage economic growth, but these have not had the desired effect.) And this entire government spendthrift phenomenon is simply a reflection of the broader cultural obsession with a constant increase in wealth (meaning a constant increase in spending).

Many states are thus aiming to lure data centers in hopes of being pulled to fiscal solvency by the industry of the future. Ultimately, the problem is that this approach does not address runaway spending, such as in government schools (which are a resounding failure, and everybody knows it—hence the incessant calls for more money to solve the problems with these institutions). Tax breaks for data centers will eventually give way to some form of tax directed specifically (or effectively so) at data centers to help cover budget gaps. Such levies are most likely to come in the form of an energy tax, possibly under the guise of preventing climate change.

Unfortunately, states have limited ability to do much to remedy their local economies, as so much of the taxes collected from a typical area goes to the federal government. States like South Carolina (whose budget for fiscal 2010–2011 consisted of almost 40% federal monies) are at the mercy of the federal government because so much of their budgets depend on federal contributions. Any major policy deviation from the federal government threatens that flow of money.

Conclusions

Tax incentives are likely to put South Carolina back into contention with North Carolina for major data center projects. Many large companies are looking for inexpensive locations to build their data center facilities, and South Carolina’s relatively cheap land and energy make it a distinct possibility. Until now, however, North Carolina has lured companies with a tax edge that South Carolina didn’t offer. Ultimately, however, even the growing data center industry will likely be unable to significantly aid states and localities in their budget woes. Data centers bring a few high-tech jobs and may spur some development, but the overall flagging economy and governments’ unwillingness to rein in profligate spending means that states like South Carolina are fighting a losing battle—pending some meaningful policy change. Sales tax incentives, such as those South Carolina may soon pass, could lead to overall increased tax revenue, but in the face of the state’s deficit (to say nothing about its debt), this will do little to help.

Nevertheless, by luring more companies to build data centers in the state, South Carolina may convince other companies (even beyond the data center industry) to view it as a hospitable environment for high-tech business.

Photo courtesy of DonkeyHotey

NSA’s Utah Data Center

Currently under construction in Bluffdale, Utah (near Salt Lake City), is a gargantuan data center that will house a large chunk of the NSA’s computing power. The U.S. domestic spying agency is expected to complete its $2 billion facility in September 2013, according to Wired (“The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)”). All told, the facility will cover one million square feet and will consume an estimated 65 megawatts of power. In addition, it will be able to pump as much as 1.7 million gallons of water per day.

Perhaps no organization is more fun to pick on than the U.S. government, and in particular, spy agencies. Many Facebook users regularly gripe about that company’s privacy policy, but they seem to say little about a data center designed to spy on their every digital move. What’s worse, really? Facebook leaking information to some company that might send you a targeted solicitation for some product or service that you don’t want, or a government looking through all your personal data in an attempt to determine if you count as an “enemy combatant” to be stripped of all legal rights? Whatever your view on that matter, the NSA’s mega data center is a notable project worth keeping an eye on—after all, it’ll be keeping an eye on you.

Apple’s Maiden, NC, Project

A less nefarious facility (unless you ask Greenpeace, maybe) is Apple’s new data center in Maiden, NC. The company has planned for a budget of $1 billion over the next 10 years according to Wired (“Wired Scores Exclusive Aerial Photos of Apple’s ‘Area i51’”), and it’s not finished tweaking its 500,000-square-foot data center. In addition to the data center (an estimated cost of around half a billion dollars), Apple is also building a fuel cell plant and a solar farm designed to help power the facility. Like some other data centers, the company is hoping to reduce its energy bill by harvesting its own energy; this site may prove to be something of a test case for whether power generated on site is realistic from a return-on-investment perspective. Time will tell whether Apple’s cloud data center is a proof or disproof of the concept of local alternative energy sources being economically feasible.

Prineville, Oregon: Data Center Capital of the U.S.?

Maybe not. But it is the site of the notable Facebook data center build. The social networking giant already has one 300,000-square-foot data center running at its Prineville site (at a construction cost of about $210 million), and it is currently building another facility at the same site—in addition to possibly planning a third. Also helping to put Prineville on the map is another Apple data center, which will cost an estimated $250 million. A third company may also soon reveal construction of a data center, creating an interesting change of fortune for the previously little-known region. These facilities illustrate a growing trend toward data center construction in remote areas that provide climate advantages (for free-cooling purposes) and government tax incentives. Prineville may not rival major cities in absolute data center presence, but if you’ve heard of this location, it’s probably been in the context of data centers.

Google Iowa

In Council Bluffs, IA, Google is adding to its existing installation with another data center project estimated at $300 million, totaling $900 million invested in that area. New facilities in the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars range are becoming less than spectacular, but what sets this project apart is a potential satellite antenna farm “to support a TV service that would be carried over its Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) network,” according to FierceTelecom (“Google to spend $300M to expand Iowa data center”). The company is taking advantage of tax incentives in this effort. But (obviously) that’s not all for Google.

Google Asia

Many companies see Asia as the economic powerhouse of the future, and Google is not to be left behind. The company is spending $300 million to build its third Asian data center—this time in Taiwan—summing to a total of more than $700 million when including Google’s data centers under construction in Hong Kong and Singapore, according to ZDNet (“Google starts construction of Taiwan data center”). The vastly different culture and government regulations hamper such efforts in Asia, but the opportunities afforded by the emerging economies in that region—especially in light of flagging western economies that have yet to resolve their debt and other difficulties—are too good for companies like Google to pass up. The search engine giant may meet stiffer competition for local markets, but it is betting heavily that investment in Asia will pay off.

Battle for $1.2 Billion: Iowa Versus Nebraska

DesMoinesRegister.com (“Cities’ efforts could secure data center”) reports that the two midwestern states are struggling to win a data center project totaling around $1.2 billion. The company planning the facility has yet to be named, but it is no doubt waiting for the best bid (in tax incentives and infrastructure resources) before making its decision. Many local governments, in an effort to increase revenue in the face of crushing debt loads, are looking to tech companies as a means of bringing in money through their data centers. To these localities, tax and other incentives are a small price to pay for the income these facilities would generate, as well as the jobs and development they bring.

Too Much to Cover in Detail

An increasingly information-based economy requires ever expanding IT infrastructure to provide the services that users (companies and consumers) demand. As such, the above list is only a small sample of recent and upcoming data center builds and expansions. The benefits of the cloud (many of which revolve around the lack of required capital investment) are driving large tech companies to build mega data centers that provide cloud-based services, creating headlines of billion-dollar, million-square-foot facilities (or thereabouts) consuming tens of megawatts. But smaller data center builds are numerous as well.

But if one project from the above list had to be selected for an award, it would definitely be the NSA’s facility in Utah. Aside from its impressive physical stats, this mammoth data center highlights American schizophrenia when it comes to privacy: private companies getting your private data to send you advertisements is somehow less acceptable than government agencies getting your private data to tax you more, send you to prison or worse.

The biggest question mark from the above sampling is split between the identity of the company planning the $1.2 billion data center in the midwest and whether Apple’s alternative energy project will be a success (i.e., whether the company will do something similar at other data center locations). But these are the questions that keep the data center market interesting.

Photo courtesy of IntelFreePress

Preparedness for unexpected power events requires the ability to rapidly identify the individual servers at risk of power overload or failure. A variety of proactive energy management best practices can not only provide insights into the power patterns leading up to problematic events, but can offer remedial controls that avoid equipment failures and service disruptions.

Best Practice: Gaining Real-Time Visibility

Dealing with power surges requires a full understanding of your nominal data center power and thermal conditions. Unfortunately, many facilities and IT teams have only minimal monitoring in place, often focusing solely on return air temperature at the air-conditioning units.

The first step toward efficient energy management is to take advantage of all the power and thermal data provided by today’s hardware. This includes real-time server inlet temperatures and power consumption data from rack servers, blade servers, and the power-distribution units (PDUs) and uninterrupted power supplies (UPSs) related to those servers. Data center energy monitoring solutions are available for aggregating this hardware data and for providing views of conditions at the individual server or rack level or for user-defined groups of devices.

Unlike predictive models that are based on static data sets, real-time energy monitoring solutions can uncover hot spots and computer-area air handler (CRAH) failures early, when proactive actions can be taken.

By aggregating server inlet temperatures, an energy monitoring solution can help data center managers create real-time thermal maps of the data center. The solutions can also feed data into logs to be used for trending analysis as well as in-depth airflow studies for improving thermal profiles and for avoiding over- or undercooling. With adequate granularity and accuracy, an energy monitoring solution makes it possible to fine-tune power and cooling systems, instead of necessitating designs to accommodate the worst-case or spike conditions.

Best Practice: Shifting From Reactive to Proactive Energy Management

Accurate, real-time power and thermal usage data also makes it possible to set thresholds and alerts, and it introduce controls that enforce policies for optimized service and efficiencies. Real-time server data provides immediate feedback about power and thermal conditions that can affect server performance and ultimately end-user services.

Proactively identifying hot spots before they reach critical levels allows data center managers to take preventative actions and also creates a foundation for the following:

• Managing and billing for services based on actual energy use
• Automating actions relating to power management in order to minimize the impact on IT or facilities teams
• Integrating data center energy management with other data center and facilities management consoles.

Best Practice: Non-Invasive Monitoring

To avoid affecting the servers and end-user services, data center managers should look for energy management solutions that support agentless operation. Advanced solutions facilitate integration, with full support for Web Services Description Language (WSDL) APIs, and they can coexist with other applications on the designated host server or virtual machine.

Today’s regulated data centers also require that an energy management solution offer APIs designed for secure communications with managed nodes.

Best Practice: Holistic Energy Optimization

Real-time monitoring provides a solid foundation for energy controls, and state-of-the-art energy management systems provide enable dynamic adjustment of the internal power states of data center servers. The control functions support the optimal balance of server performance and power—and keep power under the cap to avoid spikes that would otherwise exceed equipment limits or energy budgets.

Intelligent aggregation of data center power and thermal data can be used to drive optimal power management policies across servers and storage area networks. In real-world use cases, intelligent energy management solutions are producing 20–40 percent reductions in energy waste.

These increases in efficiency ameliorate the conditions that may lead to power spikes, and they also enable other high-value benefits including prolonged business continuity (by up to 25 percent) when a power outage occurs. Power can also be allocated on a priority basis during an outage, giving maximum protection to business-critical services.

Intelligent power management for servers can also dramatically increase rack density without exceeding existing rack-level power caps. Some companies are also using intelligent energy management approaches to introduce power-based metering and energy cost charge-backs to motivate conservation and more fairly assign costs to organizational units.

Best Practice: Decreasing Data Center Power Without Affecting Performance

A crude energy management solution might mitigate power surges by simply capping the power consumption of individual servers or groups of servers. Because performance is directly tied to power, an intelligent energy management solution dynamically balances power and performance in accordance with the priorities set by the particular business.

The features required for fine-tuning power in relation to server performance include real-time monitoring of actual power consumption and the ability to maintain maximum performance by dynamically adjusting the processor operating frequencies. This requires a tightly integrated solution that can interact with the server operating system or hypervisor using threshold alerts.

Field tests of state-of-the-art energy management solutions have proven the efficacy of an intelligent approach for lowering server power consumption by as much as 20 percent without reducing performance. At BMW Group,[1] for example, a proof-of-concept exercise determined that an energy management solution could lower consumption by 18 percent and increase server efficiency by approximately 19 percent.

Similarly, by adjusting the performance levels, data center managers can more dramatically lower power to mitigate periods of power surges or to adjust server allocations on the basis of workloads and priorities.

Conclusions

Today, the motivations for avoiding power spikes include improving the reliability of data center services and curbing runaway energy costs. In the future, energy management will likely become more critical with the consumerization of IT, cloud computing and other trends that put increased service—and, correspondingly, energy—demands on the data center.

Bottom line, intelligent energy management is a critical first step to gaining control of the fastest-increasing operating cost for the data center. Plus, it puts a data center on a transition path towards more comprehensive IT asset management. Besides avoiding power spikes, energy management solutions provide in-depth knowledge for data center “right-sizing” and accurate equipment scheduling to meet workload demands.

Power data can also contribute to more-efficient cooling and air-flow designs and to space analysis for site expansion studies. Power is at the heart of optimized resource balancing in the data center; as such, the intelligent monitoring and management of power typically yields significant ROI for best-in-class energy management technology.

About the Author

Jeffrey S. Klaus is the director of Data Center Manager (DCM) Solutions at Intel Corporation.

Why Pick on the Biggies?

Large companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Are making rather impressive efforts to incorporate renewable power sources (like solar) into their data center energy diets, and they are building facilities with impressively low PUEs. Given some estimates of average data center PUE across the entire industry are around 2.0, construction of a facility with a PUE of 1.1 or lower (for instance, Yahoo!’s Lockport data center, which has a claimed PUE of 1.08) is quite admirable. Many of these extremely low-PUE facilities are built by these mega companies—so why is Greenpeace picking on the big names and not the smaller companies, many of which operate facilities with much higher PUEs?

No doubt, part of the reason is exposure. Almost everyone has heard of Facebook and Apple, so when Greenpeace picks on these companies, it is able to ride the fame (or notoriety) of these companies into the headlines. Obviously, attacking the ABC company of Nowheresville won’t garner the same attention as an attack on Microsoft.

Concomitantly, the large companies are the ones with lots of money. And Greenpeace does nothing to hide its desire for these companies to lobby the government for a certain type of energy policy—in other words, the environmental gadfly is trying to maneuver these companies into doing its work (and paying for it). And these large companies often oblige for fear of being labeled an enemy of the environment, although no doubt some of their efforts are simply token in nature.

What’s Greenpeace’s Beef?

Greenpeace’s recent report looks at companies’ reliance on coal and nuclear energy, as well as their efficiency, use of renewable energy, choice of location and similar considerations, “grading” their efforts in each respective area. Companies featured in the report, beyond those mentioned above, include Akamai, Amazon, IBM and Twitter, among others.

The Data Center Journal has briefly considered the different alternative energy sources (“Alternative Energy Sources Roundup”), and although each has some potential along with its own peculiar advantages, each also has a number of downsides. Coal and nuclear—the energy sources with the greatest ability (currently) to meet existing demand—are viewed most negatively by Greenpeace.

But not all companies can locate their data centers within range of a hydroelectric plant. For one, eventually the capacity of that plant will be maxed out, leaving other companies to rely on other sources (i.e., coal and nuclear). Furthermore, power used by a data center is power that can’t be used by another consumer, so the gain is not as clear as it may seem. No doubt, Greenpeace believes that as more data centers use renewable energy sources, public interest in those sources will expand and energy companies will build more infrastructure to support them. To some extent, this may be true, but alternative energy sources still lack the ability to meet demand on a large scale. Locally, for instance, a hydroelectric power plant might be great—but it can’t serve an entire nation or the world.

The Economic Problem

Energy does so many things—it transports us from one location to another, processes data to give us information on our computer screens, does household chores (e.g., laundry) and so much more. Demand for energy, therefore, will continue to increase, particularly if prices fall or even remain the same. Thus, the only way for alternative energy sources to make a dent in coal’s and nuclear’s dominance—and thereby appease Greenpeace—is for their prices to be comparable to or lower than those of coal and nuclear. Unless an alternative energy source can show some economic viability in this sense, the only alternative is increasing the price of coal and nuclear—and that’s easy to do if you just add enough regulations. No doubt, this is part of Greenpeace’s agenda. (And not all regulations are bad, nor does the government have no role in environmental matters—but governments are notorious for overregulation of just about everything.)

Ian Bitterlin, in a BCS article (“Are Greenpeace attacking the younger generation and their ‘dirty data’?”), notes that “what Greenpeace don’t seem to understand is that in the context of the growth rate in digital services…the growth in renewable energy capacity is falling far behind.” In other words, the demand for energy is outstripping renewable capacity, meaning that standard energy sources are the only option for a large portion of energy needs. Ultimately, then, Greenpeace’s problem is not so much with the data center companies’ energy diet, but the demand for services. Hence, Bitterlin asks whether Greenpeace isn’t simply alienating the younger generation that relies so heavily on Facebook and other digital services.

Data Centers Don’t Just Eat Energy

Yes, data centers consume a lot of energy, but they also empower users—both companies and individual consumers—in a number of ways that reduce energy consumption (or otherwise aid the environment) elsewhere. For instance, email (particularly when universally accessible through the cloud) reduces consumption of paper for written communication. Remote services enable workers to reduce their commuting time, lowering oil consumption. Online shopping means fewer miles spent traveling to stores. One could certainly find both good and bad aspects to these trends, but clearly, data center energy use is not simply an “adder” to existing energy consumption by other sectors. Bitterlin notes, “Then we could consider the lower-carbon enablement that data centers bring to our society—better communications, more education, less travel, smart-grid enablement, smart-buildings…even more effective democracy as we saw in the Arab Spring.”

Again, economics somewhat balances this change. Let’s say the Internet reduces miles traveled by workers and shoppers, thus reducing demand for oil. Lower demand means lower price, but that lower price might encourage, say, more-distant vacations, which bumps the price (and consumption) back up. But the energy-consumption fault lies with the consumers of IT services (Greenpeace is one such consumer) as much as (if not more so than) with companies that provide the services. So, Greenpeace’s attack does indeed amount to an attack on the broader IT culture.

Conclusions

Greater efficiency in the data center is great, but it’s not going to solve the problem of increasing demand. Indeed, a higher-efficiency service tends to cost less, meaning demand will grow to make up the difference (the Jevons paradox). The solution to the problem of runaway energy consumption by data centers is not simply a matter of improving efficiency or even relying more heavily on alternative energy—two items on Greenpeace’s wish list. Demand for services will probably continue expanding as long as there’s more energy at a relatively low price to power those services. In the meantime, the only solution may be to wait to see how energy supply pans out relative to price and demand.

Photo courtesy of HowardLake

Focus on Infrastructure

Colocation providers, as such, are primarily focused on supplying data center infrastructure to customers—not so much on IT equipment and operations. As a result, this is the area in which they have the most control of their facilities’ energy efficiency. Infrastructure in this regard breaks down into two essential areas: cooling and power distribution. In a sense, colocation customers are supplying or purchasing machines that eat power (and network bandwidth) and leave behind heat. The colocation provider’s job is to provide that power and remove the waste heat. In addition to these primary functions, however, the colocation provider must also supply certain infrastructure elements to enable employees to do their work—the most obvious of these is lighting and environmental controls (heating and cooling).

Cooling

The biggest drain on energy efficiency (particularly as measured by power usage effectiveness—PUE) is cooling. Every watt of energy consumed by the IT equipment (or by power distribution or any other part of the facility’s infrastructure) is turned into heat, and that heat must be removed if a constant temperature is to be maintained. The data center industry has been increasingly focusing on free cooling (air-side or water-side economization) as a much less energy-intensive means of keeping the facility cool, and colocation data centers can likewise exploit this option. In addition, ASHRAE’s recently expanded recommended and allowable temperature and humidity operation ranges enable even greater use of free cooling—even year round in many locations. Colocation data centers can thus simply follow the industry trend in this regard.

The complication, however, is selecting the appropriate operating temperature range. Not all of ASHRAE’s allowable operating ranges apply to all types of IT equipment; some manufacturers might void warranties for some of these ranges, meaning that not all colocation customers would be served by, say, the A2 operating range. The recommended range would be better suited to a wide variety of customers, but of course, it reduces the opportunity for free cooling in many regions. Locating the colocation data center in a cooler climate is one option, however, that increases free cooling potential.

Airflow management is another growing industry trend that colocation facilities can also exploit. Maintaining a larger temperature gradient by segregating warm air and cool air increases cooling efficiency, as well as energy efficiency. Hot aisle/cold aisle containment and the use of chimneys above cabinets and over CRACs or CRAHs are two means of increasing the temperature gradient. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis also enables facilities—particularly in the design stage—to eliminate hot spots and other thermal anomalies that can hinder efficiency.

Power Distribution

Avoiding losses between the utility entrance and the IT equipment is a critical means of maintaining high efficiency. Every percentage point of loss owing to inefficient UPS systems or distribution units means more wasted energy every moment. Even if you wish to avoid more-novel designs, such as those that involve DC power, you can still reduce power waste by implementing high-efficiency AC uninterruptible power supplies. In addition to cooling, this is where colocation data centers have the greatest control of their energy efficiency characteristics.

Peripheral Infrastructure

Chances are your facility has employees that must perform a variety of maintenance and operations functions. (The chances are actually pretty good—right around 100%.) The facility must provide adequate lighting, heating (in the winter) and cooling (in the summer), but this need not kill your efficiency. Lighting, in particular, is one area where significant improvements can often be made. Motion-sensing systems can turn off lights when employees are not present, eliminating the “oops, I forgot to turn the lights off” factor. For heating office areas in the winter, remember that your data center is filled with little heaters—why not put that heat to work whenever possible?

Modularity

Some colocation providers can barely keep up with customer demand, but for those that are growing at a more controlled pace, a modular design approach avoids the installation of infrastructure that goes unused, leading to wasted capital and sometimes (depending on the infrastructure type) decreased efficiency. Building on pace with demand, rather than trying to forecast demand, enables efficiency on a number of fronts—including energy.

Don’t Leave Your Colocation Customers Out

Although colocation providers cannot necessarily control what types of IT equipment (specifically with relation to energy efficiency) customers use, they can nonetheless take steps to increase efficiency on this front. Offering customers resources on best practices for energy efficiency not only can lead to greater overall efficiency for the facility, but it can also yield cost savings for the customer and free up capacity in the colocation data center for other customers. Consider providing tips on virtualization, consolidation, leading-edge process technologies and other means of improving efficiency on the IT end.

Depending on how important efficiency is to your business, you might consider implementing customer rewards for efficiency practices. Some providers charge a premium for a highly efficient facility, since the customer is actually gaining more from the provider’s investment relative to a less efficient facility, although this may not be the greatest draw for customers. Whatever the case, providers can work with customers to improve energy efficiency—not all of this task need rest purely on the shoulders of the provider, although the provider has the onus of setting the overall tone of an emphasis on efficiency.

Conclusions

As infrastructure providers, colocation data centers must focus primarily on cooling, power distribution and peripheral infrastructure (like lighting) to maximize energy efficiency. The IT equipment, which is generally provided and controlled by customers, is out of the provider’s hands. But many of the modern industry practices with regard to areas like cooling and UPS systems apply equally to colocation providers: by implementing free cooling as much as possible and installing high-efficiency uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) are tremendous steps toward a low PUE. Furthermore, a modular design approach allows providers to meet current demand and expand in the future as necessary, without the waste (in both capital and operational expenses) associated with implementing infrastructure beyond current needs.

But the data center need not pursue efficiency alone. By educating customers (and possibly instituting a reward policy for energy efficiency), the colocation provider can improve its overall efficiency while also reducing costs for the customer—a mutually beneficial approach. Thus, in many ways, managing energy efficiency is much the same for colocation data centers as for any other IT facility. But the primary difference—the customers—need not be a roadblock to an efficient facility.

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Photo courtesy of ChrisDag

• Coal. Sitting at the top of the heap is the energy source with the poorest PR rating (with the possible exception of nuclear power). Pluses: Coal is fairly abundant, and extensive infrastructure is already in place to generate power from it. It is also safe to handle, posing little direct risk, and it enables continuous energy production. Minuses: Coal mining is dangerous or environmentally destructive (or both), and burning coal produces a variety of emissions.

• Nuclear. Following the Fukushima disaster, nuclear energy has fallen more than a couple notches in its palatability to the general public. But it is perhaps the only energy source that currently stands a fighting chance to replace coal. Pluses: Nuclear reactors use relatively small amounts of fuel to produce large amounts of energy. Like coal, it enables a continuous supply of energy proportional to demand. Emissions are negligible, assuming containment of the nuclear materials is maintained. Potential also exists for development of safer reactors, such as those that use thorium. Minuses: Standard nuclear reactors use radioactive fuel, which also leaves behind radioactive waste products that must be carefully disposed of. Attacks or accidents—such as occurred at Fukushima—can wreak extensive damage on people and the environment. And if you want to explore alternative nuclear technologies, be sure not to offend the thorium cheerleaders, or they’ll beat you with their pom-poms.

• Solar. Solar offers a number of advantages, and some data centers (such as Apple’s Maiden, North Carolina facility, which is under construction) employ their own solar infrastructure. It is the most accessible energy source for direct power generation by individuals and small companies. Pluses: The sun is a virtually inexhaustible supply of energy, and it is available to everyone, free of charge. Conversion of light into electricity produces no emissions, and the infrastructure is safe and can be implemented on scale ranging from very small to fairly large. Minuses: The sun shines on average for only about half the day, meaning energy production is limited to half time. For nighttime use, daytime energy must be stored, requiring battery banks. Furthermore, a significant area of solar panels is needed to meet all the energy needs of a typical home or business, and data centers would require even more, owing to their energy appetites. Factors such as seasons and weather also cause variation in the amount of energy produced, making solar power unable to act as a constant energy source. In addition, solar panels are fairly expensive, and the recent Solyndra debacle inspires little confidence in the economic feasibility of solar.

• Wind. Wind is about on par with solar, offering a tempting alternative, but one that has little potential to compete on a large scale with coal and nuclear. Pluses: Like solar, wind relies an a safe, abundant energy source: air movement. Harnessing wind produces no waste products, and it can also be implemented in a variety of scales. Minuses: Obviously, wind energy is only available when the wind is blowing, and these conditions can vary from minute to minute. Wind is therefore not a reliable source of energy, although it is not limited to daylight hours, as solar is. Mining practices for the magnetic materials used in wind turbines also raises some environmental concerns, as do the effects of these turbines on birds and even the aesthetics of the land or ocean. Wind energy, like solar, can be a good supplement to a more consistent energy source like coal or nuclear, but it cannot alone meet the world’s power demands.

• Hydroelectric. By relying on gravity and the natural movement of water by atmospheric processes, energy can be extracted from rivers. Some data centers are intentionally located near sources of hydroelectric power. Pluses: As long as the river is flowing, hydroelectric turbines will keep running. Thus, they provide a fairly consistent energy supply without producing emissions and without needing large amounts of area like wind or solar farms. Minuses: The construction of dams for hydroelectric power purposes often necessitates flooding of a large area of land. Furthermore, these dams can disrupt water ecologies owing to the obstruction of waterways and to the heating of water. Seasonal or longer-term variations in water level can also affect energy production, and failure of a dam can result in catastrophic flooding of surrounding (often populated) areas. Generally, hydroelectric requires fairly large-scale infrastructure that’s accessible only to fairly large energy companies.

• Geothermal. Geothermal energy is abundant in some places, and it can even provide a broader means of supplying small amounts of energy for certain uses. Iceland offers a unique location for data centers, as it has a relatively cold climate (good for cooling) and abundant geothermal energy (to help power the facility). Pluses: Geothermal energy is simply heat contained in the Earth, and using it doesn’t produce emissions or other harmful waste products. Even in average locations bearing no resemblance to Yellowstone Park, the relatively constant temperature of the ground can provide a means of heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Minuses: Locations with abundant geothermal energy  are also often subject to geological threats such as earthquakes and volcanoes. Geothermal thus offers a novel source of energy in some isolated cases, but pending some new technology for harnessing it in a larger-scale manner for electricity, it has little chance of competing with some of the other technologies listed above.

• Fusion. This energy source moves closer to the realm of science fiction. Fusion is a real process, and can yield large amounts of energy—the problem is employing it in a manner that both yields abundant energy and is economically feasible (the bane of many an energy source). Pluses: Fusion is something of a holy grail in science and engineering. It offers the potential for a continuous, large-scale energy source that produces no harmful wastes, which could make it a competitor with coal and nuclear. Minuses: Achieving fusion at low (i.e., manageable) temperatures is challenging, and the means to enable controlled, large-scale fusion have yet to be demonstrated in both a technically and economically feasible manner. Fusion offers many potential benefits, but its usefulness as an energy source may have to remain science fiction.

• Biofuel. Ethanol is the standard-bearer for biofuels. You may even remember having seen an ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) commercial about how obtaining ethanol for fuel simply requires growing more corn—a tempting prospect. Pluses: On the surface, biofuels seem like a no-brainer. Let some organisms (plants, bacteria or whatever) do all the work, then simply reap the energy rewards. Of course, some refinement is generally required, but in principle, the system is feasible. Minuses: What do you get when you combine propaganda, government money and a hugely subsidized farming industry? Ethanol. Presumably, ethanol reduces the need to drill for oil (along with its associated hazards), but apart from its harmful effects on engines, ethanol reduces gas mileage in automobiles and is arguably just a gimmick intended to further subsidize agribusiness. The idea of simply growing energy sounds great—until you realize that producing corn requires vast amounts of (petroleum-based) fertilizer to supplement the soil, which has already largely been stripped of nutrients by overfarming. Biofuels are generally overhyped, and although they may have some application, they are unlikely to offer an energy source of any major consequence.

• Other sources. Star Trek fans might ask about antimatter. Yes, antimatter and matter combine to create a relatively large amount of energy (E = mc2), but antimatter is rare. Furthermore, containment of antimatter is problematic—as Federation starships discovered in numerous TV episodes. Even more-exotic energy sources, like zero-point energy, are controversial with regard to their usability. They are fascinating because of their hints at virtually limitless free energy, making us wonder how much better life would become, but they have yet to see practical application. This isn’t to say that some marvelous new form of usable energy won’t be discovered, but neither is it intended to provoke excessive optimism.

Given the present status of science and technology, a mix of energy sources seems to be the most likely prescription for the future. No one source meets global energy demand without some drawbacks. For data centers in particular, a mix of coal, nuclear, hydroelectric and solar seems to be the most likely energy diet for at least the next decade, although nuclear seems to have a precarious future. These facilities will generally remain “on the grid,” as home-generated power sources have yet to advance to the point that they can provide sufficient energy to meet requirements. This is particularly true in urban areas, where space limitations prevent installation of company-owned power-generation infrastructure. No doubt, however, the progress of energy science will be interesting to observe.

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Photo courtesy of Marcel Oosterwijk