On Wednesday morning there was very interesting discussion of power management in datacenters and data management software
James Hamilton — formerly of Microsoft and now at Amazon — gave a killer keynote talk on power in datacenters. He traces the power from the provider through all the steps involved in powering machines and cooling. He compares all the power-related costs to the costs of the machines, networking and other costs of running a datacenter, and points out the places where efficiency can be found. A few things amazed me: