Green data center marketing is making me sick
If one more person pitches me on a Green Data Center story, I will barf in my laptop. Unless your server literally sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and sequesters it below the earth, please don’t pitch me on your green angle.
It could just be me — I’ve been living and breathing Green Data Centers for at least the past 10 months. I’m up to my ears in green because I have been writing a book on environmentally responsible data center operations (Chapter 1 will be published next week).
The environmentalists’ worst nightmares are coming true. This whole green wave could be just another fad — like the Macarena. Everybody is going to turn to whatever is next while marketers circle like vultures to suck the last bit of life out of the coolest pheonomenon to happen to IT since the Web.
Maybe I’m just jaded. Where are you at in the hype cycle? Is green IT just getting onto your radar or are you reaching for the Pepto? We’ll do our best to be gatekeepers against greenwashing. But do you want to see more coverage of actual green technologies? And can we blame green marketing for killing the goodness?
Posted: August 21st, 2007 under Green data center.
Pepto please.
Datacenters house servers. Servers turn electricity into bits on a wire. The byproduct (waste) of that transformation is heat.
No matter how you tart it up, data centers have turned into huge energy hogs. Moore’s Law has an energy/heat cost that everyone seems to be waking up to as it is harsh and expensive. Couple that to Ohm’s Law and you have reality. These laws are at no risk of being repealed so I’m on your side here. These “green” stories are just latching onto a fashionable trend in an attempt to get play.
Can we make improvements to the current designs? Can we make them more energy efficient? Can we build systems that are more self-contained and sustainable?
Yes to all the above. But the baby steps the industry is taking right now are NOT a “wave of green” by any stretch of the imagination. They are just the natural evolution of an industry in its toddlerhood.
Mainframes and minis were our Duplos and Fisher-Price toys. We’ve moved onto Legos and small erector sets. Someday we’ll get it right, but not tomorrow.
–chuck
Comment by cgoolsbee — August 22, 2007 @ 12:39 am
False pre-suppostions are the idiot’s paradise.
The great and greatly fluctuating heat from our little star makes the heat generated by computers insignificant. These are attempts to try to make one’s self appear more important and significant than reality justifies.
On the other hand, the dollar cost of the extra energy, the cooling requirements, etc must be considered if the enterprise wants to survive financially.
In most applications I’ve seen, an inefficient software design unnecessarily consumes more energy than is saved by the adoption of symbolic green hardware.
Comment by Bob Schmidt — August 28, 2007 @ 11:27 am
As someone that is both involved in the management of data centers and a marketer, I must say that while green washing is highly widespread with many, many marketers using green hype instead of green reality.
That said, the data center industry may end up having to be the exception due to having little choice in making the green decision due to:
- crippling rising electrical costs
- shortage of data center real estate (also rising cost)
This plus recent regulations which will force data center operators to re-evaluate their “greening” of their data centers,
mean that unlike many business who are falsely using “green” to hype their products, data center companies simply have no other alternative but to revamp and/or build green data centers
Comment by Curtis R. Curtis — April 17, 2008 @ 8:10 pm
poseable use the heat’s energy and convert heat to DC current, feed it back in, and there you go,, solved the waste heat problem…
Comment by Code Jammer — August 3, 2008 @ 12:47 am