Data center utilization - 15% of 11.8 million is still a big number
- TAGS:power
- IT TOPICS:Data Center, Hardware
Treehugger had a brilliant piece a few weeks about the statistics on computers and data centers.
The headline figure is amazing -- 11.8 million servers in the USA in 2007. The disturbing one is that most of those machines runs at 15% capacity or less, still idling and consuming power. Even more disturbing is that half of the power used to power data centers is required just to remove the heat they generate.
The industry as a whole is going the right way, but there is no nirvana here. Virtualization only solves so many problems, and as many companies have found out, sometimes you need spare capacity just to cope with the huge spikes that you sometimes get in your server usage. When you have to cope with spikes like the one mentioned in Dissecting today's Internet traffic spikes, there are limits to what you can do. As the article points out, with a spike that high for just 60 secs there's no time to provision a new server, virtual, or otherwise. More collaborative use of computing power - like that offered by Amazon's EC2 might be a solution for some but there are limitations to that model too.
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