High Efficiency Google Server Design

Yesterday, Google revealed their own “home-brewed” data server design.  Google has been using this custom design since 2005, while constantly improving design efficiencies.  Google has custom designed servers in order to achieve maximum energy efficiency.  Some key aspects to this custom design include: a 12v battery built into every server and a custom made power supply that only uses 12v power rails, instead of the typical 12v/5v combination.

How much efficiency is Google really seeing with all of these improvements? Well, for example, Google has seen battery usage efficiency as high as 99.9%.  This is roughly a 4%-7% increase over using conventional centralized UPS systems.  Now this may not sound like a lot but when you have literally thousands of servers, this becomes a very big deal. Google has really displayed that they have a passion to make their company as energy efficient as possible.  Not only does Google have custom servers designed to maximize efficiency but Google continues to invest in energy through their Google.org arm as well.

Google is one of the few companies that openly and actively tries to reduce their energy consumption. Google seems to understand two very key aspects of energy:

1. Energy is a valuable resource
2. We need to help each other in reducing the amount of energy consumed

Now, lets not forget to mention one of the most obvious aspects to this: less energy means more profits.  Google must have an electrical bill the size of a small country so, any amount that they can reduce is a positive for them financially.  I mean, who doesn’t like making more money right. 

If you would like to look at some pictures or read more about this check out this CNET NEWS article.

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