Xfernal's Techno-Dev Mumbling

An article found on CNET - Power could cost more than servers, Google warns claims that with rising power cost, "If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin,".

Interestingly, over the past year we have replaced several old servers from our stack. Specifically, we removed an old HP 3000r NetServer and replaced it with a Dell 1550, 7 U smaller in size and wattage of 217 when compared to the HP's 1464 total wattage. I'd say that is a huge difference when compared to performance and wattage consumption, even talking about a couple of old servers we use just for development.

"If server power consumption grows 20 percent per year, the four-year cost of a server's electricity bill will be larger than the $3,000 initial price of a typical low-end server with x86 processors. Google's data center is populated chiefly with such machines. But if power consumption grows at 50 percent per year, "power costs by the end of the decade would dwarf server prices," even without power increasing beyond its current 9 cents per kilowatt-hour cost, Barroso said."

While this is definitely true, what about the fuel cell technology? The promise of this technology WILL reduce power cost. With devices already on the market but primarily for industrial use because of hydrogen storage issues, it becomes uneconomical. However, several scientist are looking at methods of extracting Hydrogen from the air. I guess we will see... In the meantime, I will be exploring how to use a fuel cell to power our server stack ;-)