Microsoft Takes The Data Centre Naughty Chair

A week ago, a blog post from Microsoft emerged in which it preened about how green the company’s data centres are, and got quite a bit of news traction. Now, I wonder if it was a smokescreen intended to distract us from truly shocking revelations that were about to appear in the New York Times.

While proclaiming to run a very green ship, with energy waste at a minimum, in a town called Quincy in Washington State, Microsoft was actually burning off energy for no benefit at all – except to reduce a fine imposed on it by the local energy provider, according to the NYT.

The blog last week explained that Microsoft planned to cut out diesel backup (something Quincy residents had complained about), as well as reducing water use.  But it certainly didn’t present a picture of a company that would burn electricity off just to protect its own coffers.

The fact is that incidents like this are almost inevitable given the way the data centre industry works. The whole thing is optimised, sure enough, but not around saving energy or emissions.

Data centre waste

After years of working to make PUE (power usage effectiveness) the de facto standard for measuring data centre efficiency, you would think these processing warehouses would be wasting almost no energy by now.

But the truth is that energy use is just one factor in equations governing the running of data centres – and not the most important by any means.

Data centre owners, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook, are all about cost and reliability. They need to run each operation for as little money as possible – but it needs to be close to 100 percent reliable.

So there must be backup power, and servers have to keep running when they aren’t in use. PUE just optimises by reducing the amount of electricity wasted on its way to the servers – and that takes no account of what is done with IT’s servers themselves.

The time is ripe now to replace PUE with a different measure, that distinguishes between the “fixed” and “variable” costs within the data centre. FVER, which we have covered previously here on TechWeekEurope, would do just this – so the overhead of running servers without any computation load would be exposed as a waste. We want to see FVER used, and from now on TechWeekEurope will challenge any operator proffering a PUE score to switch to a better metric.

But the tale of Microsoft in Quincy shows the problem is bigger and deeper than that. The dynamics of data centres have an impact outside the hall itself.

Quincy is a town of around 7000 people – but it has major data centres run by Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, Sabey and Vantage, because of favourable deals offered by the electricity utility.  The power is offered very cheaply, and it’s green: Grant County Public Utility makes hydroelectric power from the nearby Columbia River.

But in return, the data centre owners commit to using a certain amount of power. Grant County PUD wants steady loads. And Microsoft’s data centre failed to burn as much power as it had promised.

Somewhat upsettingly, rather than pay a $210,000 penalty to Grant County PUD, Microsoft simply set about wasting a lot of electricity (the Times isn’t clear how much).

This raises lots of questions – and the green side may be the least of them. This was, after all, hydroelectric power, so no emissions were created in its generation. However, waste is waste, and this power could have been used for other tasks, one assumes, displacing dirty power.

What did the waste do to Microsoft’s PUE figures? I would assume in the simple minded PUE model, it was energy that didn’t reach the servers, so it would have increased the PUE.

And how was the electricity used?  Was it actually wasted, running air-conditioning in empty rooms say, or did Microsoft find things to do with it?

Any company finding itself in Microsoft’s position should look round for a way to store electricity. That would have a real benefit, as a way to replace the back-up diesel generators which Quincy residents had complained about.

But that sort of move is unlikely to happen in the current data centre world. If the bills aren’t pushing them to cut energy use, data centres actually have no incentive at all to cut the carbs.

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