[LINK] Greening ICT

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

>>>> A data-centre-in-a-day securely installed on the roof of buildings
>>   .. thus a data-centre-in-a-box would have many, many advantages.
> 
> The Gershon Report on Australian Government ICT identified 10,484 m2 
> of capacity in large government data centres in Canberra
> <http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/ICT-Review/chapter1.html#a9>. 


Understood and Jacobs(2007) in the FinReview estimates: "that Australia 
probably had about 140,000 sq. metres of data-centre space. "We believe 
that Aus requires another 80,000 sq. metres of data centres in the next 
few years," he said.  www.enterprisedata.com.au/?news/lock-up-your-data

> So about 1,000 shipping containers would be needed (allowing a bit of 
> wasted space). Assuming the new equipment in the containers achieves 
> a ten fold improvement, that reduces to 100 containers.
> 
> I expect optimization of the applications could achieve a further ten 
> fold improvement, but if I said the government's computing would fit 
> in 10 containers, no one would believe me. ;-)


Ahh, but, if you said it Tom I think many might well tend to believe it.

So.. that would mean 140 containers for all Aussie data-centres, though
one may hope they are 'not' in car-parks, which secretary Betty Boo can
easily take out with her pretty-pink little Boo-mobile, as can Mohammed.

And Jacobs continues: "EDC is part way through building a 16,000 square 
metre facility at the Norwest business park .. The cost of the facility 
building is phenomenal at $170 million. For a fully fitted-out facility, 
it's even greater. A good ballpark figure, for about 1000 square metres
would be about $27 million," Mr Jacobs said. That's $27,000 sq/metre.."

What a waste .. and what's more ... "The worse mistake is to think it's
a property play.. what happens is equipment itself becomes redundant so 
quickly. The biggest challenge is we'll buy something at $1 million and 
in two years' time its worth $10,000."

Yes, dozens of boxes, Cat5e-cabling, etc etc, certainly worth virtually
nothing to anyone. But imagine if the whole data-centre could be resold?

And distributed-computing data-centres in containers, complete turn-key
units pre-configured off-site and thus basically ready to plug-and-play
in a day, might be worth at least half or more their original purchase?

Everyone wins .. in time, money and 'certainly' re environment concerns.

Cheers Tom :)
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia