A few days ago, google inveted to a “Efficient Data Center Summit” where leaders of the IT industry discussed best practices for data center efficiency. It was the first time, that google showed videos of their data centers and presented their ways to create the “world’s most efficienct data centers”. But (as you can imagine) beeing green it is not only an important topic for google because they are ‘nice’ -- it is business.

I like the way how they described it in a blog post, because it shows that thinking about sustainability is more than social responsibility -- it can save you money:

“Sustainability is good for the environment, but it makes good business sense too. Most of our work is focused on saving resources such as electricity and water and, more often than not, we find that these actions lead to reduced operating costs. Being “green” is essential to keeping our business competitive. It is this economic advantage that makes our efforts truly sustainable.”

Google already managed it to reduce the energy consumption of its servers and Data Centers dramatically. As a result the energy that is used to perform a search is likly less than the own personal computer is using in the same time, which is really amazing (beside the servers that perform the search they need a lot of aircondition and other big enerngy consuming services to operate the Data Centers). The graph below shows how google compares the electricity usage of its own servers and datacenters to typical settings:

To further improve that, google worked out a ‘ Five Step Plan’  which includes:

1. Minimize electricity used by servers
2. Reduce the energy used by the data center facilities themselves
3. Conserve precious fresh water by using recycled water instead
4. Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves their data centers
5. Engage with our peers to advance smarter energy practices

But let’s come back to the above mentioned ‘Efficienct Data Center Summit’. The whole summit is available on You-Tube -- therefore, if you have enough time (more than 5 hours) you can wath all the presentations and videos online. Part 1 covers ‘Green Grids, Googles PUE and what they plan’, Part 2 is about ‘Best Practices, a Data Center Tour and Q & A from the panel’  and Part 3 covers ‘Sustainable Data Centers, Water Management and the Wrap Up’.

And for the ones of you who do not want spend 5 hours on watching presentations from this summit (I can understand that ) I attached the most interesting part of the Videos (the google container data center tour) below … enjoy it to see where the searchqueries that you submit 100 times every day are processed and how this is done in a sustainable way.