[LINK] Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYTimes.com

[Tom Worthington]

On 24/09/12 04:15, sylvano wrote:
> Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html

In "Power, Pollution and the Internet",  JAMES GLANZ (New York Times, 
September 22, 2012) reports that data centres have low efficiency and 
high pollution levels due to the need to be ready to respond to peak 
loads. It is true that data centres use a lot of power, but some centre 
operators, such as Google (mentioned in the article), are making efforts 
to run more efficient centres.

Canberra Data Centres, which is used by several government agencies, has 
implemented several power saving features: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2009/05/green-data-centre-in-canberra.html

Also the "cloud" server approach with a large data centre can be more 
efficient than having many smaller servers spread out in companies. The 
servers can share a load, whereas a small server dedicated to one task 
will spend most of its time running at near full power doing almost nothing.

As I commended recently at a digital record-keeping conference in 
Canberra, "cloud" computing has similarities to bureau computing systems 
used decades ago. There are efficiency measures which can be used to 
reduce the load on the system and to balance it: 
http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/cloud_records_management/

For more on how to measure and reduce the environmental impacts of data 
centres, see my book "ICT Sustainability: Assessment and Strategies for 
a Low Carbon Future": 
http://www.tomw.net.au/ict_sustainability/introduction.shtml


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/