Data Centre of the Future...

I posted yesterday about going to this conference and very good it was too.
Speakers from Cisco, Intel, VMWare & Gartner suggested, nah told us that the cloud was to be the future.
I disagree, when asked how many new shiny data centres would be built to cater for the projected growth in the cloud, because it is the future after all, no one from these blue chip corporates could tell the assembled throng, and when questioned on how new data centres could be built when the UK faces a serious potential energy gap come 2015 due to the decommissioning of nuclear and the closure of some coal fired power stations and even today no data centre can be built within the M25 because of a lack of power infrastructure and capacity, they wobbled on about new energy efficent servers and virtualisation and erm well anything to erm well ah, we are sure that erm. Yeah Guys ok, just tell us that you do not have a clue and that the cloud is built on a cloud, and unfortunately you cant live on a cloud unless you are Captain Scarlet on Cloudbase 9.

It is my belief that the cloud in the UK cannot survive the issue of power, data centres need power and lots of it. The cloud envisaged by the speakers at the conference spoke about IaaS, thats Infrastructure as a Service, Paas, thats Platform as a Service, and finally Saas, which is Software as a Service on a grand scale, and I mean GRAND.
Millions of Corporate Users and Billions of New Internet Users will all be using cloud services, and this means hundreds of new data centres, hundreds, and each one will need at least 10MW of power.
Now, how much capacity do we have in the UK?

There are many power stations of all types and sizes in the UK. A diversity of generating technologies is essential as it means that we are not over-reliant on one fuel source. Between them, the power stations in the UK have a generating capacity of some 83.5 gigawatts (GW) and produced 385,560 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity in 2008. Source:http://www.aepuk.com/about-electricity/how-electricity-is-generated/

And of the 83.5GW Capacity, over 25% are to close by 2025, over £200Billion of new investment in Power Stations, the smart Grid and Smart meters is needed to address this gap, thats more than the bankers needed to be bailed out.

21 GW - Total capacity of power stations expected to close between now and 2025 – about a quarter of our current generating capacity.
Source:http://www.aepuk.com/about-electricity/facts-figures/

On the figures above 100 New Data Centres will require a 1GW Power Station but we are going to lose 21GW of Capacity.

So, the cloud is going to expand, this must be true because some big IT industry players have told us so, but there is a fundamental disconnect between the power available and the power demand that the cloud is going to have.

I wonder how this is going to pan out, in the meantime, you can begin to monitor your energy consumption in real time and manage your IT by requesting IT energy management from Carbon3IT Ltd.
Our contact details are listed above.