Editor's Note: To learn about real-world applications of big data and hear from Kathrin Winkler, be sure to check out VERGE@Greenbuild, November 12-13.
Did you see the New York Times article on Sunday, September 23 titled "Power, Pollution, and the Internet"? If so, are you one of the three people of my acquaintance who did not send it to me.
Even my mother asked. This is what I told her: It's really not new, at least to those of us in the industry. And it's only half the story. I'm just sayin'...
Yes, demand for information technology is growing by leaps and bounds, and yes, it takes power to drive it. It's also true that availability ranks far higher than energy efficiency in any data center manager's priority list. As one IT professional put it to me on Friday, "At the end of the day, I'm paid to keep our infrastructure running."
And yes, some of the performance demand is to provide sub-second response time to view YouTube videos. But some of it is to keep planes from running into each other, to complete genome analyses, to manage traffic, to diagnose illnesses, to predict pandemics, and to warn of oncoming tsunamis. This is one of the places where the article falls short — in its zeal to highlight the waste, it undercuts its own story by neglecting the amazing value provided by information technology. That value may be economic — try comparing the value to the economy per kWh of IT versus other energy uses — or it may be human, from health care to education to personal support (and, yes, entertainment) — or it may be environmental, preventing over-fertilization of fields, or siting wind mills or solar panels.
Don't get me wrong — I'm not saying there isn't waste. In fact, I once coined the term "d-waste," or "data waste" to represent all the crap we've saved that we don't need, and all the excess copies of the data that we do need. There are indeed frivolous uses of data; the article is right about that. But it's not the whole story. And the flow of data isn't just from consumers. It's from cars, traffic lights, cameras, MRI machines, weather satellites, space explorers, and so much more. I'm just sayin'…
I also wish the article had given its due to the things that the industry is doing to be more efficient. I've said this before: By my calculation, if the automobile industry had gotten efficient as quickly as the IT industry in the last 40 years, we'd be getting 450,000 miles to the gallon. Admittedly, it hasn't been enough to offset the growth in demand. But look what we're getting for it!
Next page: Descending the learning curve
"We need to be able to show
"We need to be able to show users what the impact is of their actions."
I'm all for telling users about the impact of their actions, and telling the whole story on data centers. Something that disappointed me about the NYTimes article is how it talked about how users send around fat files, but it didn't mention how the people who own the platforms they use like to keep all that data around so they can analyse big data to personalize advertisements and sell stuff. For example, when Google introduced gmail, they initially didn't have a delete button.
It's not clear that after users do delete old emails, that they even actually are completely purged. That's not to say the data dont have economic value for someone, just that, as you say, we should have the whole story about what all the storage is for.
It's great to hear about the positive steps being taken towards greater efficiency in the data center.
Kathrin, Your 450,000 miles
Kathrin, Your 450,000 miles per gallon statement is memorable and a good try for public relations on behalf of your company, but it's just a restating of the old observation about the impact of Moore's Law, that if airliners had developed as rapidly as PCs they'd be able to fly around the world on a gallon of gas. It's apples and oranges. It in no way presents any valid justification for the extent to which energy efficiency has taken at best an extremely distant second place to full-time, "five nines" instantaneous availability of even the most insignificant and infrequently needed data. As a leader in the data storage field, I trust that EMC actually is putting a huge effort into trying to solve this problem. Of course more efficient data storage eventually means fewer drives sold for a given level of demand. But definitely in the digital world you'd better be by far your own worst competition, or someone else will be, and they'll emerge very suddenly and eat your lunch, and your breakfast and dinner as well. I look forward a year from now to seeing a press release from EMC- or someone else- announcing a comprehensive, fully integrated data center solution that achieves the efficiency levels that are needed, and that actually are possible, that will replace the excessively drive-intensive solutions that exist today.