Cuil Blog

Cuil uses far fewer machines to search the Web and serve results than any other search engine. Which is a good thing for Cuil’s VC-sized resources and a good thing for all of our natural resources, as well.

But the approach doesn’t stop there. Since we want to make the most efficient use of the resources we use, we need to be able to tightly control the amount of power we use. In order to do that, we need to be able to measure our electricity usage accurately real-time throughout our datacenters – to monitor trends, find hotspots, and tune for better efficiency.

While there are commercial power products available that fit the bill, they’re too spendy for us and not as flexible as we would like. So we decided to take the initiative by designing and building our own. This way, we get exactly the features we want and for far less money.

We designed and built this power metering device from the ground up — from drafting the design to assembling circuit boards and installing them in the data centers.

We can now measure the power used by every circuit in the data center, every second, 24 hours a day, over the network. This lets us know immediately if anything is amiss, spot changes in usage, and monitor compliance with our data center contracts. All for just about $2 worth of custom hardware per machine. And it gives us lots of pretty graphs and charts, too!