Electricity is a Network Problem

This week I’m in New York, for Interop and Web 2.0. There is lots going off here, but I’m looking for the critically important things that would otherwise be drowned out in the noise.

The most interesting network technology session was actually at the Web 2.0 show: “Electricity as the new Internet” (looks like you can catch the talk in Berlin next month too).

Why should you care about electricity? We do network stuff, right? Well… Electricity is a Network problem. A very very big network problem, or rather a ‘not a big enough network problem’. The IT industry, or IT use, is on course to be one of the largest users of power. And, in case you haven’t noticed, power isn’t getting any cheaper. Actually, as James pointed out, you might not have noticed. As an IT director, I never paid a power bill. Why should I have? I had no idea what the cost of my power usage was. I knew what my peak power usage was, roughly, because facilities needed that.

We need to get smart about electricity. It is driving where we house servers, and where we build out the network (see Data Center Efficiency at BusinessTechFeed). Google just filed a couple of patents on self powering, self cooling data centers (’scuse spelling UK friends). Where will these things be? Well, in the sea of course. There’s a network challenge for you.

Back to power, and to James’ talk. Micro power generation (basically solar on your roof, or wind turbines) is controversial and problematic right now. You have to provision for your peak power usage, which means you then have too much power during the other hours. In Germany, apparently the government has set up a scheme to buy this power back from users. How do you feel about running a power station?

The issue with power is that the best places to create it are not the places where it is most used. There is also heavily synchronized peak usage. These are very familiar problems to us net heads. It happens all the time. The challenge is that power doesn’t transport as efficiently as data. Moving it around is very lossy. But what if we could move power from African sun to London or New York servers? That’s definitely one angle.

What about if we moved the servers out to Africa? Well, that means heat problems. Hence Google’s ocean-powered concept - power and cooling all in one place. Very neat. Shame about the network cables!

James laid down the challenge for us all to think more seriously about power. He gave a fun example of an IBM Hursley fellow who’s house tweets it’s power usage (we’re British, we’re allowed to be eccentric).

We are more aware of the issue in Europe than the US, at least based on the people I’ve talked to over here. We may only be a few years away from the Network Manager being the power manager too… Something to think about.

[Update: Slides from Tom Raftery's version of the talk at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin are here]