Google is not 'power hungry'

data centres worldwide, according to a recent report, writes The Inquirer.

Strangely, this is the first time that Google has released specific details about its total data centre electricity use.

According to Jon Koomey, the report's author and a consulting professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University, Google “gave me an upper bound, not an exact number, but something is better than nothing”.

In the new study, prepared at the request of The New York Times, Koomey found that electricity used by data centres worldwide grew significantly, but it was an increase of only about 56% from 2005 to 2010. In the US, power consumption increased by 36%, according to Koomey's report, titled “Growth in Data Centre Power Use 2005 to 2010.”

“Mostly because of the recession, but also because of a few changes in the way these facilities are designed and operated, data centre electricity consumption is clearly much lower than what was expected, and that's really the big story,” said Koomey.

Fuelled by an insatiable demand for new Internet services and a shift to so-called cloud computing services that are largely hosted in commercial data centres and in the large data farms operated by companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, there has been an increasing discussion about the growing percentage of the nation's electricity that will be consumed by vast data centres being constructed at a record pace.

The Register reports that Google's worldwide data centre network spans about 900 000 servers, according to an estimate based on new information the company has deigned to share about its power use.

Previous estimates put Google's server count at over one million.