For those who may not know, today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day.  Bloggers around the web are uniting to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger, including me, is posting about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. For RipCode, that’s video transcoding.  I’ve talked in a previous post about how RipCode has introduced a powerful, yet energy efficient single RU appliance which can replace between 10 – 20 general purpose transcode servers.  And at only 165 watts, can translate into significant energy savings, especially for large data centers.
 
Other technologies like blade servers and virtualization are giving data center managers choices for reducing their overall hardware and energy use.  But in the video transcoding space, legacy general purpose servers still dominate the data centers for user generated video sites, studios and syndicators.  Internet and mobile video is growing at a tremendous rate – IDC predicts that by 2011 over 7,800 terabytes of video per day will be downloaded from websites. At RipCode we’re working to transform the way in which most companies think about transcoding and educate the market on a more efficient way to process video content.  But we also understand that not everyone can or will transition to appliance-based transcoding technology…at least not right away.  However there are things that data center managers can do to measure and improve the efficiency of both new and existing data centers.  The GreenGrid, a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers, offers a few good whitepapers for guiding data center managers on these topics. 

In an interesting article by Alex Goldman of ISP-Planet, he quotes Russell Kurtz a principal at CS Technology who gave the keynote address on a conference focused on next generation data center challenges and solutions.  Kurtz said, “Politicians and regulators are starting to notice that data centers consume a significant amount of energy. It’s 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. electric load (and growing).  The problems remain that if a data center is built for 10 MW or 20 MW, remember that an electric substation does about 40 MW.  Your data center could use half the local load.”  This underscores what we’ve heard from customers who have space to grow in their data center, but can’t get more power to their building.  Adding more general purpose servers just is not an efficient means to keep up with the amount of video that needs to be transcoded.

This is not an insignificant problem.  So on Blog Action Day, my hope is educate a few more people about the benefits of green transcoding technology like RipCode and reduce the energy footprint required to process the growing volume of online and mobile video.