Data Center Infographic (+ Opportunities for Efficiency Improvements)

May 16th, 2011 by Zachary Shahan

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.

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Tags: ABB, data center infographic, data centers, data centers infographic, datacenter infographic, datacenters, datacenters infographic, infographic, Infographics, internet infographic

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

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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.