I won’t debate this one, because its way out of my league, but I found this statement the funniest one of the week. Thanks for that James. Lets see the techie guys sort this one out!
The basic issue seems to be that you can’t get enough energy into a datacentre to simultaneously power all the servers and get enough air conditioning going to keep them all cool.
Source: BankerVision: Energy, the economics of abundance, and financial services
Technorati tags: technology+rules
Bankwatch 
It is funny, when you look at it, isn’t it?
Of course, if you’re paying for all the electricity, it isn’t so amusing, but techies are rarely the ones that have to sign the cheques for the power… might be one of the reasons we are in this situation in the first place.
Its not often we get techie humour!
as a “techie” I disagree. most of the developers I know would love to tinker and re-implement programs to make them better/faster. It’s what they get taught at university.. the ‘elegant’ solution is always the best.
This is beaten out of them by strict deadlines and cost/benefit decisions.
You’d be amazed just how common this is!
I was working in a bank here in the UK, who thought it would be a good idea to rationalise all their servers. They took them out of their offices and put them into their old datacentre, in the wilds of middle England.
Eggs and basket, may come to mind here – but it gets worse. They also decided to use HP blade servers. These things run very, very hot because they are not efficiently designed and very densely packed.
They put the first batch in (about 15% of the total) and found – yes, you’ve guessed it. There wasn’t enough power available. So they had to build a new sub-power station outside (no, I’m not kidding) and then totally replace the building’s air con.
This wasn’t an oversight, it was just plain incompetence. You see, the datacentre housed the IBM mainframes. Mainframes are WATER COOLED.
Servers, like the big PC’s they are are air cooled and loose heat by just blowing it around the room, heating it up. No one thought of that.
The best part was, in trying to sort it out, some idiot signed off the business risk by allowing the work to be carried out in the working day. They lifted up the floor tiles and saw a mass of wiring. “I don’t know what these cables are for. I don’t use them. I’ll cut them out and it’ll give me some more space to work.”
Yes, that’s right, down went the mainframes and the bank got heavily fined by the FSA.
Absolutely priceless. So, tell me again, how much have we saved with this project?
Kryton, the thing which interests me about your comment is the suggestion that the decision to not optimise software is the result of cost/benefit pressures. Of course I agree with that, having had to deal with such pressures myself. But I guess what I am wondering is if rising energy prices might change the way these cost benefit decisions are made int he future…
Neil … that story is unbelievable. It seems James is on to something here, that frankly is not, to me anyhow, that well known.
It is, Colin. James Gardner of Bankervision describes it from his point of view in the actual post that led to this.
His company is actually accommodating the extra servers needed on behalf of the bank in question.
James,
in most companies
power doesn’t usually even come into the equation. Operational staffing costs don’t either.
They just aren’t as sophisticated as that. Sure..google and some places where the datacenter represents a large percentage of their P&L would (ie dot coms), but that isn’t the case for a lot of companies…