Busy Week Ahead

Well, we're all set up for a very busy week.
First off, I am taking my CITP exam on Tuesday morning, wish me luck!
Then, later I'm off to London to attend and speak at two prestigious events, the first is Data Centre Dynamics London conference, this is being held at the London Excel Arena, more information and to book please click here DCD London.
I shall be speaking on the subject of retrofitting energy efficiency solutions into existing data centres, for me this is very important as 88% of businesses still own and operate their own mission critical data centres, the move to the cloud in my opinion is overhyped and it is very amusing to see cloud services suppliers grasping at any straw that indicates a wide spread adoption of their services.
That is not to say that I am a cloud sceptic, far from it, I think the cloud is an excellent diverse and distributed compute product that does have its benefits, however do not tell me its green when it patently is not.

None of the major cloud vendors ever consider network energy in their energy saving examples, which is a shame as, in the UK at least, the 3 big network companies, BT, C&W and Virgin Media all feature in the CRC Top 50, in fact if you crunch the table to include carbon emissions without the weighted early action metric scores, BT are 3rd, C&W are 39th and Virgin are 50th, in fact there are 9 network operators in the top 100.
This is alarming to say the least as we have yet to see how much additional energy will be required for the Fibre Broadband rollout BT is currently undertaking. I can see BT being top emitter in a few years.
For clarity, the top 3 and their associated Carbon Emissions (Tabulated) are as follows:

MOD            1,754,541 tCO2

TESCO         1,562,532 tCO2 BT                 1,258,720 tCO2

Data Centres Forced to Leave UK by CRC ?

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/government-energy-plans-could-prompt-data-centre-exodus-8772#comment-17417


This is an interesting article. Now I dont believe that any organisation would necessarily upsticks because of CRC, it might, and I stress might make some organisations think twice about locating a new data centre in the UK, but the complexity and potential problems that could be caused by moving a data centre would be, for some, too risky.


That said, the Department for Energy and Climate Change has offered a CCA (Climate Change Agreement) to the Data Centre industry if it can provide a useful productivity metric, that is to measure what a Data Centre does and how much energy it takes to do it, and then take steps to reduce the amount of energy but keep the same productivity in future years.

Because the IT equipment put into Data Centres is getting more efficient as each year goes by, it could be argued that this will happen by default, however how long is a piece of string? Business growth usually means more servers, which in turn need more energy, more servers would mean more productivity, so we have a classic vicious circle.
We've seen the vicious circle in computing somewhere else have we not? Oh Yes, that would be the software/hardware vicious circle described in one of my earlier posts.

So, is the vicious circle a required component within computing? it seems like it but the question is, do we need to break it in order to reduce our industries total reliance on electrical energy, a resource in the UK that unless something is done pretty quickly will see our little green, amber, blue and red lights flicker out.