Electricity cost-aware routing?

[complacent]

Pretty cool idea via /.

"Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Akamai have developed a network-routing scheme that could save "internet-scale" companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft million of dollars each year by moving data to locations with the best electricity prices for a particular day. The scheme simply considers both the most-efficient routing path for data and the potential cost savings of routing it somewhere farther away. The researchers studied price fluctuations at locations across the country and used data from Akamai caching servers to test the idea out. In the best possible scenario--which would require more efficient server--they estimate that companies could save as much as 40% on the electricity bills (tens of millions each year). Google already operates at least one datacenter that shuts down when temperatures get too high. Is this the next logical step for internet computing?

[Sabre]

It's an interesting idea for sure. It's funny if you compare the electricity usage of a big Cisco box to a big Dell server...
Cisco 7609: Dual 4000W PS's - 4600W is nominal. On a fully populated one, I've seen has high as 55A's being pulled on the circuits.
Dell M1000: 3 (non-redundant) or 6 (redundant) 2360W PS's - Tech Republic reports 1764W as a peak usage.

[ElZorro]

Idea is pretty common with small unattended sensors - the networking protocol and radio take in to account the distance between nodes when planning how often to transmit and which other nodes to mesh with. Great to see the idea 'scaled up'.