The New York Times on power consumption at data centers

Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image

This is an area where the Internet industry could use improvement. Here’s the damning statistic:

But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

We can do better than that.

Update: You should read this rebuttal of the article as well. (Chris posted a pointer to it in the comments but it should get top billing.)