Data Centers, Temperature, and Power

Summary

It’s easy to open a data center, right? All you have to do is connect a bunch of hard drives to power and the internet, find a building, and you’re off to the races. Well, not exactly. Building and using one Storage Pod is quite a bit different than managing exabytes of data. As the world has grown more connected, the demand for data centers has grown—and then along comes artificial intelligence (AI), with processing and storage demands that amp up the need even more. That, of course, has real-world impacts, and we’re here to chat about why. Today we’re going to talk about power, one of the single biggest costs to running a data center, how it has impacts far beyond a simple utility bill, and what role temperature plays in things. How Much Power Does a Data Center Use? There’s no “normal” when it comes to the total amount of power a data center will need, as data centers vary in size. Here are a few figures that can help us get us on the same page about scale: The goal of a data center is to be always online. That means that there are redundant systems of power—so, what comes in from the grid as well as generators and high-tech battery systems like uninterruptible power supplies (UPS)—running 24 hours a day to keep servers storing and processing data and connected to networks. In order to keep all that equipment running well, they need to stay in a healthy temperature (and humidity) range, which sounds much, much simpler than it is. Measuring Power Usage One of the most popular metrics for tracking power efficiency in data centers is power usage effectiveness (PUE), which is the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a data center to the energy delivered to computing equipment. Note that this metric divides power usage into two main categories: what you spend keeping devices online (which we’ll call “IT load” for shorthand purposes), and “overhead”, which is largely comprised of the power dedicated to cooling your data center down. There are valid criticisms of...