At the beginning of December, some of the US's biggest technology companies sat down alongside federal regulators, to assess the data center's growing appetite for power amid fears that the cost of running and cooling servers could hinder the growth of the sector.
Attendees at this meeting included AMD, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard, who had gathered in California for the chance of influencing the development of national energy standards.
The US Department of Energy (DoE), which measures power use in various industries, hopes to learn from the companies, and to design guidelines for building efficient facilities and technology, said Andrew Karsner, assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy for the department. He also is considering eventually auditing energy use in technology facilities, much like the department's audits of steel and paper plants.
The industy round table, hosted by AMD, was the first meeting in what Karsner has called a public and private partnership. Research firm Gartner estimates that within two years about half of the world's data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to service the high-density servers companies need to keep up with demand for their services and products. The use of electricity plays a vital role in powering the offices, research-and-development laboratories and massive data centers for the technology sector, which is one of America's fastest-growing industries.
The technology industry's need for energy should worry everyone, Karsner said Tuesday before sitting down with the executives. Protecting the technology sector from an energy crisis is akin to protecting the American economy, he said. To illustrate his point, Karsner hypothesized: "What happens to national productivity when Google goes down for 72 hours?