This story about Google and their rejection of high end servers, all the while saving money by making their own servers more energy efficient, is totally fascinating.

Rather than waste the electricity and incur the additional costs for cooling, Google has power supplies specially made that are 90 percent efficient…One-third of the electricity running through a typical power supply leaks out as heat full story here

This approach reminds me of the work Loc Dao did in our early days of putting CBC programs online. Loc used to always build his own servers, not to save on heat, but mostly because he found the brand names over priced and lacking the kind of goodies he wanted to see in our gear. He was right. His boxes kept us going at half the price of the brand name stuff, until we were forced by the IT folks to use the ‘standard’ stuff.

Clearly you need some smarts and lots of skill to go down this route, but it’s great to get a glimpse of how this can still be done at an enterprise the size of Google.