Intel: Cloud Factoid
August 4, 2008
I tracked down an Intel presentation from 2006 and also used in 2007. The link is to ZDNet here. The presentation offers some interesting insights into Intel’s data center problem or opportunities in mid 2006; namely:
- Intel has 136 of these puppies with an average cost pegged in the $100 million to $200 million range
- Average idle capacity was about 200 million CPU hours with capacity at 900 million CPU hours, give or take a few hundred thousand hours
- In 2006, 62 percent of the 136 data centers were 10 years old or older.
- Plans in 2006 were to move to eight strategic hub centers.
My initial reaction to this 2006 presentation was that Intel’s zippy new chips might find a place in Intel’s own data centers. It would be interesting to calculate the cost of power across the old data centers with the aging chips versus the newer “green” chips. I expect that the money flying out the air conditioning duct is trivial to a giant like Intel.
More on this issue appeared in Data Center Knowledge in 2007 here. In 2007, according to Data Center Knowlege Google had about 93,000 servers in its data centers.
In April 2008, Travis Broughton, Intel, wrote here:
Our cost-cutting measures tend to be related to at least two of the three “R’s” – reducing what we consume, many times by reusing what we already have.
I’m not sure what this means in the context of the Cloud Two initiative, but I will keep poking around.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
