{"id":11209,"date":"2018-01-23T11:00:08","date_gmt":"2018-01-23T19:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/01\/23\/news-4980\/"},"modified":"2018-01-23T11:00:08","modified_gmt":"2018-01-23T19:00:08","slug":"news-4980","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/01\/23\/news-4980\/","title":{"rendered":"Making \u201cgreen\u201d with Bitcoin apparently not so green"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Patrick Donovan| Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:10:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cryptocurrencies: \u00a0a reminder to the data center industry to remain vigilant on efficiency<\/p>\n

Cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, have been in the news a lot recently due to their extreme volatility and their ability to make overnight millionaires. \u00a0While some people are touting these digital currencies with no government or financial institution backing as the way of the future, others warn this is all just empty speculation\u2026 a giant soap bubble ready to pop. As most of us watch and wait, there have also been stories saying Bitcoin transactions are terribly unsustainable from an energy use standpoint. How could that be so?<\/p>\n

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rely on decentralization and distributed IT resources to maintain the integrity of the block chain. In one study,\u00a0Digiconomist<\/a>, created a\u00a0Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index<\/a>\u00a0to highlight the energy being used in these block chain transactions. \u00a0They\u2019re claiming a SINGLE transaction consumes 306 kWh of electricity, which is roughly enough to power 10.35 U.S. households for an entire day. To give more perspective, total annual Bitcoin energy consumption is currently at almost 37 TWh\u2026or about the same as a small country such as Denmark or Bulgaria.\u00a0Data Centers are springing up<\/a>\u00a0all over the place to mine bitcoin.<\/p>\n

For me crypto currencies are another reminder and demonstration of how everything in our lives is becoming digitized and power dependent. \u00a0And this puts huge pressure on all of us in the industry to figure out how to make all this happen in a more sustainable way. I think most people tend to forget or not think about what\u2019s really behind the Wizard of Oz\u2019s curtain that makes all this IT magic happen; i.e., the massive amounts of energy resources and infrastructure needed to make it all work and work reliably. But most of us in the industry (and some outside, of course) know we have to do something. \u00a0There\u2019s been a growing pressure over the last decade to make things better. \u00a0And the data center industry has, indeed, come a long way over the last 10 years or so in terms of efficiency\u2026the days of PUE scores of 2 or more are mostly long gone. \u00a0In fact, my team (the Data Center Science Center) did some research on this and showed over a 10-year period, there was generally an 80%(!) reduction in losses bringing the typical PUE of 1.84 down to a very respectable 1.17. We came up with this by modeling what we thought was a common data center in 2006 and comparing that to one that would be common today. \u00a0It assumed the newer data center used air containment, cooling economizer mode, and a more efficient UPS. \u00a0The graph below shows the huge reduction in losses because of these \u201cstep function\u201d improvements. Oh, and P.S., the cost per watt to build data centers has come down a lot too!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As the demand for and reliance on IT continues to grow, the question for us in the industry must be, \u201cwhere does the next 80% come from?\u201d Where do we all go from here? \u00a0How do we solve the energy crisis even as energy demand and the world\u2019s population continues to grow? \u00a0This is our great challenge. Schneider Electric is dedicated to finding solutions. \u00a0For those of us in Schneider focused on data centers, we see the next 80% coming from optimizing the broader ecosystem of the data center. \u00a0It\u2019s not going to come from a percent improvement here and there in equipment efficiency. \u00a0It\u2019s going to come from looking at the entire architecture and figuring out how better to optimize and manage it.<\/p>\n

The next \u201cstep function\u201d improvements will come from, we believe, the integration of renewables & energy storage, optimization of the load (ie, demand side optimization), improved cooling strategies (ie, liquid cooling & air economization), adapting pre-engineered & assembled infrastructure systems (micro data centers<\/a>,\u00a0prefab data centers<\/a>\u00a0& free-standing IT\u00a0pod frames<\/a>), and software. \u00a0Yes, software\u2026. but not your father\u2019s on premise, license based software. \u00a0I\u2019m talking about\u00a0cloud-based software<\/a>, such as Schneider Electric\u2019s\u00a0EcoStruxure<\/a>\u00a0System Architecture, that takes advantage of IoT technologies and big data analytics to provide unparalleled actionable insights. \u00a0And it\u2019s this evolution in data center software management that will put us further down the path towards automation, machine learning, and AI in the data center.We will be talking much more about these exciting improvements and trends in future\u00a0blogs<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0white papers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The post Making \u201cgreen\u201d with Bitcoin apparently not so green<\/a> appeared first on Schneider Electric Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/blog.schneider-electric.com\/feed\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Patrick Donovan| Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:10:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cryptocurrencies: \u00a0a reminder to the data center industry to remain vigilant on efficiency Cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, have been in the news a lot recently due to their extreme volatility and… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Making \u201cgreen\u201d with Bitcoin apparently not so green<\/a> appeared first on Schneider Electric Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[12389,12388],"tags":[10490,12391,12400,12500,13483,15819,12432,12463,17256],"class_list":["post-11209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scadaics","category-schneider","tag-bitcoin","tag-data-center","tag-data-center-operations","tag-data-center-planning","tag-data-center-planning-and-design","tag-digital-currency","tag-ecostruxure","tag-micro-data-center","tag-pre-fab-data-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}