Brain In The Fridge

You’ve probably heard of cloud computing—a popular way now to access data stored elsewhere from your device. Its mention evokes an imagery that is benign and endearing, like rain-bearing clouds. A beguilingly naturalistic metaphor for technology. For, what’s actually entailed in cloud computing are millions of square feet of energy-guzzling data centres filled with whirring hard disks that require a lot of electricity to run and be kept in ambient temperature. And they are leaving beh­ind a carbon footprint the size of the last cumulonimbus cloud you saw. 

Data centres have been around since the days computers began to net­work, a mother hard disk that several users drew on or accessed at the same time. The advent of internet and its gro­wth have only made them larger. Today, it is where your inbox lives and where your bank account details are recorded. But they are now set for the next big leap in India with cloud computing.

As people begin depending more on their smartphones and tablets (instead of laptops and desktops), manufacturers are under pressure to augment storage space. Eager to draw in more buyers, they now promise additional space on ‘clouds’—their data centres that you can access through the internet from your device. Soon, this is where your photos, worksheets, music and videos will live, not just your e-mail. This growth is what has some worried about the kind of energy that will be needed to keep these growing number of machines running. As it happens, global cloud computing, back in 2007, was already consuming more power than all of India was.

Data centres can either be captive, i.e. be located at the firm’s office, or be a third party one, where data is stored at a centre run by another firm specialising in hosting services. Some common examples of firms with data centres would include nearly all banks, research laboratories and transport services, like the railways and airlines. Most of the energy consumption at data centres goes in powering the servers and running air-conditioning to keep them cool. While all of them have batteries as back-up, they even store diesel on site now for any emergency. But these centres in India have increasingly become notorious for gorging on power to cool machines that are anyway demonstrably under-utilised.  

Shaheen Meeran, MD of Schnabel DC Consultants, a Bangalore-based firm that specialises in data centre planning, says it inevitably happens that only between 11-17 per cent of the capacity (both storage and computational) of servers is actually put to use. Companies tend to keep their servers idle or on stand-by to respond to any sudden surge in online activity. Fearful of any downtime that can be caused by a crashing server or a slow one, something that can cause financial loss and drive away customers, companies choose to play safe and foot the extra power bill. “This paranoia builds redundancy into the data centre. Often, this is combined with a reluctance to retire old servers. In any case, there’s little knowledge about the actual power consumption at these centres as it is usually based in some rented place with no metering facility,” she adds.  

While India is not yet home to some of the iconic data centres of internet majors like Google and Facebook, it may not be long before they too arrive as their businesses grow in India and require faster connectivity. There has been some speculation of Google setting up a “$1 billion” centre here. However, this hasn’t held back Indian firms from setting up centres that are some of the world’s biggest. The size of “1,340 cri­cket pitches” or the “world’s third largest” is how Tulip describes its data centre in Bangalore that has a total planned power capacity of 100 MW and houses data related to the UIDAI project, among others. The city’s daily power demand is around 2,300 MW.

The government, which is keen on e-governance, has also announced the creation of data centres in each state capital. Making any estimate of data centres in India is difficult as it remains to be defined precisely. But a Boston Consulting Group report for India predicts a jump from 4,248 data centres in 2010 to 7,012 in 2015. But few of them, if any, are housed in energy-efficient structures or otherwise use ren­ew­able energy. “The biggest problem with traditional and small-scale data centres is that nobody takes responsibility for their optimisation. The facility guys of a firm provide the power and the IT guys simply consume it,” says Sanjay Motwani, country director of Raritan, a US-based firm that offers management tools for optimising data centres. “The big ones, on the other hand, especially those that back up research labs, treat power expense as a given. Nobody ever questions their power consumption,” he adds. Even those who have deployed power management tools at their centres tend to use only some of the more mundane features. “Most think about it from the point of view of operational ease. It’s like how 99 per cent of us use microwaves just to reheat our food instead of also using its umpteen other features.”

Today’s state-of-the-art data centres for large cloud service providers around the world report ‘power usage effectiveness’ levels as low as 1.1 to 1.2. This is a measure of how efficiently a computer data centre uses its power. Few in India can come close to this range. To illustrate, Tulip reports a PUE of around 1.94 at its centre in Bangalore and an upcoming one in Manesar (near Gurgaon) for the UIDAI project is designed with a PUE of 1.6. In India, the average is anywhere between 1.8-2.3.

The Bureau of Energy Efficiency has put out guidelines for efficient data centres but it continues to be more of a best practices guide rather than a code. “We have to deploy a specified PUE that these date centres need to follow and report back on periodically. It’s not only important but needs to be mandated to reduce their carbon footprint,” says Motwani. And faster and more compact CPUs are causing more damage. “Built to process faster, they emit much more heat and because they are compact, the heat is even more condensed.”

But efficiency alone is not going to make these data centres green. Mri­n­moy Chattaraj, a campaigner with the Climate and Energy Unit of Gre­en­pe­ace, says that huge data centres as bulk users of energy ought to start lobbying with the government and do more for accessing clean energy to power their centres. “Other than a few like Wipro that advocate the use of clean energy, most are lagging behind.  If this doesn’t change, the clouds are still going to be brown and not clean because they shall remain powered by coal and thermal-based energy,” he says.