Analysis of how to use optical fiber technology to reduce the energy consumption of data centers to measure the size of the data center, there are three standards, the number of blade servers; the size of the area and the power consumed. DataCenterknowledge once published a valuable report on large data centers in April last year. The report mentioned the world's largest data center, LarkSide Technology Center, located in Cermak, 350 miles east of Chicago, covering an area of more than 10,000 square feet, and the power supply exceeded 100 MW. Among the 10 largest data centers in the world, the smallest area covers six football fields as large as it adds up.

Although the number of data centers is usually not announced, this data can still be learned from some other ways. For example, Microsoft's Data Center has more than 224,000 blade -type servers, which are distributed in thousands of racks of 110 containers. In the world, according to statistics from IDC, the number of server sales is more than 7 million units each year, so it is not unusual to have more than 100,000 servers in a large data center.

The scale of the data center is growing, and the consumed power is becoming more and more amazing. In the United States, the electricity consumed by the data center accounts for 3%of the total power consumption of the United States. It is estimated that the cost of power can reach $ 7.4 billion per year. It is precisely because the power consumption is so amazing that the designers of the data center are looking for all possible ways to reduce power consumption.

On the one hand, the energy consumption of data centers has continued to rise, and on the other hand, the global demand for data centers is also growing at an alarming rate. In June of this year, Cisco Network Index (VNI) predicts that in 2015, the annual traffic will reach the level of trillions of trillion trillion bytes. 1Zettabyte is equal to 270 bytes or 1024 Exabyte. In general, global IP traffic will increase four times in the next five years. The traffic growth rate of large websites such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix is particularly obvious. In any case, there will be more and more data to process data centers in the future, but the energy they can use must be less and less.