After reading the Greenpeace, Renewable Energy, and Data Centers blog entry from my colleague James Hamilton a couple of weeks back, I took a look at the Greenpeace report on data center power consumption and noted that it’s pretty unusual for an environmental report to not feature energy conservation as a primary evaluation criteria.
It seems to me that any analysis of the climate impact of a data center should take into consideration resource utilization and energy efficiency, in addition to power mix. Carbon emissions are driven by three items: the number of servers running, the total energy required to power each server, and the carbon intensity of energy sources used to power these servers. Using fewer servers and powering them more efficiently are at least as important to reducing the carbon impact of a company’s data center as its power mix. I thought it would be interesting to run the numbers on this and take a look at how these three factors interact when it comes to overall carbon emissions from compute activity.