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Among the biggest surprises was a single 12-volt battery that powers each of the servers -- rather than using a UPS for backup energy for every server, each machine is independently powered if the need arises.
"This is much cheaper than huge centralized UPS," Ben Jai, the man who designed the servers, told CNet. "Therefore no wasted capacity." Jai also explained that server-mounted batteries have achieved greater than 99.9 percent efficiency.
The announcements are the latest move from Google to open up some of the proprietary information that it has guarded so closely since the company launched. Google has long been working on achieving extreme levels of energy efficiency -- the newly not-secret servers are the "sixth or seventh generation" of a project that launched in 2005, according to Jai -- and now it hopes to share some of that expertise with the industry.
At the summit yesterday, Google talked about the Power Usage Effectiveness rating of its data centers -- a number that indicates how much power goes to the data center that is not used directly for computing, such as for lighting or cooling systems. A PUE of 1 means every watt goes to computing machines, while a PUE of 1.5 means half the power goes to non-computing functions.
Google yesterday said that it had gotten its average PUE down to 1.19 by March 15, although in the hotter months the scores tend to climb as cooling becomes harder to achieve. The company's most efficient data center has achieve a PUE of 1.12, according to Chris Malone, who works on Google's data center design.
In October of 2008, Google released some details of their green data centers, including a five-step plan for green IT. Google also made news last fall when it received a patent on wave-powered data centers.
Google land-fill?
So Google borrows a power supply design that has been around since the 40's with on-board battery backups. This is nothing new. The military used it in 28V powered radios and electronics for over 50 years.
In the early 80's we saw thousands of PC build with internal batteries as well. This lead to a very perplexing set of problems.
No way to replace defective batteries.
No way to monitor the health of the batteries.
And the Big KAHUNA problem - batteries being improperly disposed in landfills.
So now we are to believe that Google, the every watchful steward of scarce resources who constantly run afoul of the EU and tip-toe around every environmental watchdog agency, have found a way to properly deconstruct their servers and server power supplies to reclaim and recycle these batteries.
On the surface this is an interesting concept but one has to remain a sceptic until the paper trail is revealed and audited by non-aligned third-party organizations. Preferably the BSI or other EU watchdog organization with the horsepower to perform an end-to-end analysis. And freedom to report all findings with impunity.