Data Centers and the data explosion have been in the news now for a while. Join us as we dive into the topic with international Data Center expert David Mytton.
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Data Centers and the data explosion have been in the news now for a while. Join us as we dive into the topic with international Data Center expert David Mytton.
Email us: powerbytes@cat.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/cat-electric-power/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Caterpillar.Electric.Power/
Power Bytes Podcast
Data Centers: Featuring David Mytton
Intro: Good Day and welcome everyone to Power Bytes! I am your host Lou Signorelli and Power Bytes is your destination Podcast for power generation conversations. As always please know how much we appreciate you, our listeners. We hope you find our topics helpful and interesting. There are several ways for you to get in touch with the show. You can send us an email at powerbytes@cat.com or visit us at Cat Electric Power on Facebook or LinkedIn. Please remember to subscribe and leave comments wherever you listen to our show… it really helps.
Lou: Data Centers and the data explosion have been in the news now for a while and we thought it was time that we dedicated a show to what's happening in the data center business.
Joining me today is David Mytton. Many of you might read his blog. David is Co-founder & CEO of Console, which launched early-2021 to provide the best tools for developers. He was also a Research Affiliate on the data center sustainability team at Uptime Institute and was recently researching sustainable computing at Imperial College London.
David has appeared on national TV (e.g. Sky News, Channel 4 Dispatches), been quoted in national and international news media (e.g. WSJ, Financial Times, Computer Weekly).
When you have a chance, I encourage you to have a look at his blog page at Davidmytton.blog
David, thanks for joining us today.
Lou: David I'd like to focus on a blog post you updated in October of 2021 titled "How much energy do data centers use?" I think an important place to start is how difficult it is to get Data center energy consumption data and what the latest estimates tell us.
David:
• The academic literature provides a range of between 200-400 TWh, which equates to 1-2% of global electricity demand.
• Transparency is the main barrier to providing a more accurate estimate – there are no official, global statistics and almost all data centers are owned and operated by private companies, many of whom release limited data.
• This means modelling using equipment shipment data and power consumption testing is used. Differences in modelling methodology mean the estimates come out differently. For example, the 200TWh estimate does not include crypto whereas 400TWh does.
Lou: Let's talk a bit about what is actually inside a data center from a power consumption perspective. What are the top consumers of power in a data center?
David:
• Four main components: servers, storage, networking, facility.
• Breakdown of each one from the blog post.
Lou: Let's talk efficiency. I've seen data that shows the power consumption of servers is going down, while the actual computing capabilities are going up. What does this mean for overall data center power consumption?
David:
• This is more about power utilization at a given load, called the dynamic range or power proportionality. When a server is at 10% utilization you want it to be consuming 10% of maximum power. That has been improving.
• General improvement of this through better firmware, better power management software, better hardware efficiency.
• Cloud computing – more efficient allocation, serverless, facility efficiency (PUE).
Lou: PUE has long been used as a measure of data center efficiency. But, lately it's come under fire. Why? And is there a better metric?
David:
• It’s often used as a measure of efficiency, but it was never designed for that. It also shouldn’t really be used to compare facilities because it is designed to to measure improvements within a facility. But everyone uses it as a comparison because it’s the only metric data centers tend to publish.
• A PUE of 1.0 means 100% of data center power inputs go to the IT equipment. The industry average PUE is 1.67 but ranges from 1.11 to 3.0 (this is due to the large amount of power consumed by non-IT equipment)
• Using the PUE ratio alone has been criticised because it will decrease when IT load increases.
• Improvements have stalled for the past few years because all the gains have been achieved. New facilities can design in better efficiency, but it’s harder for existing facilities to improve.
Lou: Has someone come up with a better measure of efficiency at the datacenter level?
David
Not really. PUE is widely used and reported – Uptime Institute survey data shows 70% of data center operators track it. Everything else is the responsibility of the IT equipment owner. There are lots of other proposed metrics, but basically nobody uses them.
Lou: That said, what do you see as the biggest challenge for data centers going forward?
David:
• Number of small data centers is falling.
• Number of large, hyperscale data centers is increasing.
• Good = older, inefficient data centers are being replaced by more efficient and innovative hyperscale data centers.
• Bad = larger facilities have larger power requirements from the grid. Due to the wide range of data center energy consumption figures, it is difficult to grid operators to plan for infrastructure like new generating capacity and transmission. In some countries, data centers are expected to become some of the largest sources of power demand. For example, Ireland measured a 144% increase in data center energy consumption over the past 5 years - from 1.2 TWh in 2015 to 3.0 TWh in 2020 - and this demand is expected to grow to account for 27% of all Irish electricity demand by 2029. Denmark has issued similar warnings, warned similarly with data centers projected to account for 15% of Danish electricity consumption by 2030.
• This has challenges for the grid because of the power density. Also tend to be built away from users due to cheap land. There will likely be a split between centralized facilities and more expensive edge locations for latency sensitive applications.
• Power consumption for new workload types e.g. machine learning, is also an open question.
• Sustainability is a big issue but the latest Uptime Institute survey shows most data center organizations are not tracking their environmental footprint. The big cloud providers are, so they risk falling behind as customers demand energy and carbon data.
Lou: David we hear a lot from the Data Center industry about their sustainability goals. Is it only those large cloud providers working on this or is everyone?
David:
• The large cloud providers are doing the most, but it trails off quite significantly as you go out to other data center operators.
• From the latest Uptime Institute survey, sustainability is a growing issue but most data centers are not tracking anything to do with carbon emissions. The survey data shows 82% of data centers track power consumption, which is because they pay for power, but only 40% track server utilization and even fewer – 33% - track carbon emissions.
• Why? A combination of lack of customer demand and no reporting requirements from regulators. It would be unfair to say data center operators don’t care about the environment, but most of them are doing nothing. You can’t improve if you don’t track.
• On the other hand, the data center operators generally aren’t running the equipment they host. They sell the power to the end user to run the servers and other IT equipment racked in the data center. But who’s responsibility is it to account for the environmental impact? The IT owner who is leasing the space and generating the power demand? The data center operator who is providing the space? The procurement team who sign the contracts with the energy companies.
Lou: David, thank you for joining us on Power Bytes. There is certainly a lot here that we can unpack. I hope you’ll come back and speak with us some more.
Lou: There you have it folks. If you’d like to get in touch with us here at Power Bytes, please feel free to send us an email at powerbytes@cat.com, or you can visit us at Cat electric power on Facebook or LinkedIn. Please be sure to follow, subscribe, and comment on the show wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and until next time, have a great rest of your day.