An old post on I-Iron

The Million of Irons
Filed under: Computers, Cloud Computing — @ 4:04 pm

In 2002, I was working for large Unix server project. The server was really large and consumed a lot of electric power. If you ever asked yourself, in what type of energy computers convert the consumed electric power?, then you the answer - to the HEAT. (There is a clear explanation on the physics of this phenomena).

Thus, knowing this fact, the best approximation for any thermal calculation will be a device which effectively converts the electric power to the heat! Let’s say it will be an Iron! Irons for 1000Watts are very common, so 1kWatt makes calculations much easier and simpler.


The image of iron is very effective representation of the actual environmental impact of any computer system or a data centre.

For example:

An average server is equal 2 irons
Large servers are between 20 and 60 irons
A typical data-centre in Google - one million irons
The total power consumed by data centres a world wide 60,000,000,000,000 irons *

(*) It is according to APC: “Data centre power and cooling infrastructure worldwide wastes more than 60,000,000 megawatt-hours per year of electricity that does no useful work powering IT equipment.” read more here

p.s.

There is some “irony” in the slang name used for mainframes - “the big iron” :)

p.p.s.

Google might be estimated as a 10 millions irons company.