Instant apps, uptime, data storage—the internet in the future is bound to be complex. The web can be deemed an enormous industry, not only by the number of people using it but by the sheer amount of waste it generates, reveals an exclusive, well researched piece by James Glanz in the New York Times.
The way popular websites run their businesses against huge risks of losing followers, says Glanz, is shockingly energy consuming. “Worldwide, such centers use the rough equivalent of the output of 30 nuclear power plants”.
In 2006, Facebook was much smaller with about 10 million users. The company had a 40-by-60-foot rental space with racks of computer servers. That year, the engineering department at Facebook was faced with a problem as it realised the electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.
The company’s engineering chief, took some employees and bought every fan they found to blast cool air at the equipment and prevent the website from going down, reports the Times.
Getty Images.
Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems, writes Glanz.
They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centres that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information.
The image of sleek efficiency depicted by the way the web works is actually built on a shaky foundation, given the consumption of electricity by the industry. Websites devise novel ways to keep the power running, in fear of a breakdown, like the kind Facebook faced in 2006.
In Silicon Valley, many data centres appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.
“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centres. “A single data centre can take more power than a medium-size town.”
“It’s a waste,” said Dennis P Symanski, a senior researcher at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry group, told Glanz.
Analysts warn that as the amount of data and energy use continue to rise, companies that do not alter their practices could eventually face a shake-up, the size of an upheaval. And it would take nothing short of a revolution to manage the industry that is the virtual world.
