Data Center Infographic (+ Opportunities for Efficiency Improvements)

Data centers use a ton of energy, as the infographic below from ABB (“Powering the cloud”) will show you. I shared a related infographic on the data centers of the world’s biggest websites a few weeks ago, which I think was quite interesting and eye-opening, but the infographic below gives us even more perspective and discusses some key recommendations for making data centers more efficient. Check it out if you are interested in this topic and how to improve the efficiency of these tremendous energy consumers (click on the infographic to enlarge it).

Clearly, the energy use of the IT industry and data centers, in particular, is a huge topic today and will be an even much bigger topic in the years to come. Solutions such as those identified and emphasized below by ABB are tremendously needed, as well as increased implementation of renewable energy and smart grid projects.

More infographics.

Zachary Shahan (2293 Posts)

I'm the director of CleanTechnica, the most popular clean energy website in the world, and Planetsave, a leading green and science news site. I've been covering green news of various sorts since 2008, and I've been especially focused on solar energy, electric vehicles, bicycling, and wind energy for the past few years. You can also find my work on Scientific American, Reuters, Think Progress, GE's ecomagination site, several sites in the Important Media network, & many other places. To connect on some of your favorite social networks, go to zacharyshahan.com or click on some of the links below.

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It takes alot of energy to power the cloud.

But what would we bloggers do without it?

If i couldn’t upload files from my ‘droid to my dropbox, there would be great sadness…
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Jon K

How about more efficient software?

We software guys used to joke it was our job to make the software slower faster than the hardware guys make the hardware faster.

We won.

Seriously, for decades now we’ve been using more and more hardware resources to make writing and maintaining software easier, quicker and cheaper. Of course at any given time in the evolution we worked hard to optimize whatever stack there was to get the highest whatever number. But the stacks kept growing and growing and the hardware jocks kept blowing us away with amazing Moore-ian progress.

Maybe it’s time to put a pile of effort into cutting through the amazing layers of generalizing systems to reduce back from millions the number of instructions it takes to echo a darned keystroke.