Will a switch to light speed cut power use at data centres?
Source: BBC ·
To save power and add capacity, data centres are switching from copper wires to tech using light.
From the source
Data centres use vast amounts of copper in electrical and data systems "I think we're at the end of copper," says Chris Sharp, the chief technology officer at data centre operator Digital Reality. He's not saying that we are running out of copper, instead Sharp, and many others in the data centre industry, are betting that it will be used less. Data centres use vast amounts of the metal: around 400 tonnes , external will go into typical facility of around 100MW (data centre size is measured megawatts, a unit of electrical power). Most of that copper is used in the electrical infrastructure needed to power the datacentre and for cooling systems. But up to 70 tonnes is used by the computer servers that do the work of processing data in that 100MW facility. Meanwhile, up to 20 tonnes is used for the network wiring connecting up those computer servers. It's here, in the spaghetti-like wiring which snakes through a data centre where copper is targeted for replacement. "The wires between…