January 14
U.S. companies spent approximately $5.8 billion powering servers in 2005 and another $3.5 billion or more keeping them cool
This compares with approximately $20.5 billion spent purchasing the equipment.
More from the article:
Rather than any single, readily fixed cause, the current IT power crisis is the result of a combination of subtle trends. At its core is what Jerald Murphy, COO and director of research operations at Robert Frances Group, refers to as the “dark underbelly” of Moore’s Law: As processor performance has doubled every couple of years or so, so too has power consumption and its side effect, heat.
That wasn’t a problem decades ago, when the latest and greatest chip consumed 8 watts, instead of the 4 watts of its predecessor. But as power requirements slowly grew over time, things changed, until we reached a tipping point of sorts in the past two or three years. Today’s chips require anywhere from 90 to 110 watts — twice as much power as the chips of just a couple of years ago. They also run hotter, which drives up the cost of datacenter cooling. And if that wasn’t enough, the growing use of blade servers — once viewed as a panacea to power and space limitations — is only making things worse.
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