Google's 38 2 MW Diesel Generators in Iowa

Data Center Knowledge pointed out due to the permiting process for Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, you can see that there are 38 diesel generators permitted for the facility with a rated power of 2919 bhp (2 megawatt)

Emission Unit(s):

1430 W. South Omaha Bridge Rd.

Council Bluffs, IA 51501

200001

Equipment Location:

None

Emission Point:

Diesel Engine (EU 200001; 2,919 bhp; 137.9 gallons/hr)

Control Equipment:

Also, Data Center Knowledge has pointed out the backlogs for generators and new FCC requirements for cel networks are putting strains on the supply of generators.

"Generator lead time for a nice 2 megawatt diesel engine is now up to a year for one generator," Josh Snowhorn of Terremark said in a panel at the NANOG conference earlier this year. "So we can build all the raised floor we want, and then sit around and wait six months for a generator."

In an effort to keep phone and wireless networks online during natural disasters, the FCC is now requiring telecom and wireless companies to provide backup power for cell sites and remote telecom facilities.

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Dream or Nightmare of Measuring power within devices

It is a nice dream to have power consumption measurements built into IT devices (pc, laptop, servers, storago, and switches).  The problem is this is not a high priority for any vendor and it will be done at minimal cost for development and production to provide a checkbox feature. This method is why wake-on-lan is so unreliable no one uses it once they figure out how inconsistent Windows and the devices are for this feature, and how different implementations from vendors cause frustration for users.

Power management as much as we would all love it to be built in to devices is going to be inaccurate an inconsistent. The google guys say they measure power consumption of their servers by tracking the cpu utilization <link>.

But, I think a more elegant way is to measure the power consumption on in a labo and a sampling of production units while collecting data from Windows Device Manager on an inventory of enumerated devices while collecting performance monitoring data for cpu, IO, RAM, monitors, and other power consuming devices.

Closed loop feedback systems are one of the architecture methods I use to think about whether systems have been thought through for how the system provides data on its operations.

Closed loop feedback is a well proven technique, but surprisingly is not used much in IT systems.

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Yahoo gets hit with 7.9 sales tax for Quincy Data Center

Yahoo had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new facility in Quincy with David Filo, co-founder attending. A recent finding by the Washington state attorney general removes a 7.9 tax break for this new data center.

The loss of the tax break could keep Yahoo from investing in future phases of the data center that opened Monday, Filo said.

"So far everything has worked out well," he said, noting the favorable economic, political and geographic conditions that have made building data centers in the middle of farm fields in Central Washington a sensible thing to do. The abundance of cheap power available in the region is the bottom-line benefit for server farms, but the rural tax break is so significant that Yahoo would not have built in Quincy had it not been part of the equation, said Laurence Mann, a Yahoo senior vice president.

The sales tax break would have saved Yahoo and other data centers the 7.9 percent tax charged on construction and equipping of a facility, said Mike Gowrylow, a spokesman for the state Department of Revenue.

Microsoft opened a portion of a 500,000-square-foot data center in Quincy in April. The tech company Intuit also is building a facility in Quincy.

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Google's Dalles Data Center

This article is a little old, but I decided to collect information about data centers from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  June 14, 2006 the NYtimes had an article about how hard it is to hide a data center as Google seeks more power.

Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power

Melanie Conner for The New York Times

Google is building two computing centers, top and left, each the size of a football field, in The Dalles, Ore.

Published: June 14, 2006

THE DALLES, Ore., June 8 — On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky.

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The New York Times

The complex, sprawling like an information-age factory, heralds a substantial expansion of a worldwide computing network handling billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services.

And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border — at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking — is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they are building big data centers upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., 130 miles to the north. But it is a race in which they are playing catch-up. Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.

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