Submitted: The Two Sides Team December 31, 2012
Over at Ecopreneurist, a look at the issue of green data centers, not an unfamiliar topic here in the Going Greenosphere. One passage stood out…
November 21 2012
by Richard Romano, WhatTheyThink
Over at Ecopreneurist, a look at the issue of green data centers, not an unfamiliar topic here in the Going Greenosphere. One passage stood out:
To add on to its iDataCentre in North Carolina, Apple slashed and burned nearly 171 acres of woodlands to clear a way for its [sic] solar power array. Even worse, the solar power array will only provide a measly 24 Megawatts. This is the company running iTunes and iCloud they will use much more power than that. So take a hint from Apple; dont build or choose to use a data center like theirs. The financial benefit wont be as great, and you wont be reducing your carbon footprint by much at all.
On the other hand, Facebook recently opened a new data center in Sweden north of the Arctic Circleif youre going to be cooling servers and such, it helps to be in a pretty frigid environment. Everyone is looking to migrate computer storage to the cloud, and that is going to create an even more dramatic demand for data centers. The article mentions that the data center industry now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry, and while its tempting to simply put the data centers on planes and perhaps consolidate the emissions (no, it doesnt work like that), the growing demand for cloud computing will more or less force data centers to be constructed in a more sustainable fashion. As mobile devices and tablets replace proper computers, storage will be one of the missing linkshence the need for cloud storage. Heck, we need someplace to keep all those cat videos and meal photosfor some reason.