FOCUS LEADER
Issue 4, June 2009
EDITOR’S COMMENT
As good citizens, we must not shirk our responsibilities and should seek effi ciencies wherever we can.
Everyone has a responsibility to tackle climate change by using and wasting less energy. The world is heating up and we are producing too much carbon. We should start switching things off.
This, loosely, is the script to a current UK government TV ad campaign.
While turning us all into good world citizens, the government wants business to pick up the tab, as when faced with a problem, like all governments, the UK’s answer is to fashion a tax.
The UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment carbon trading scheme is coming and it will affect many data centers. And where the UK is proudly taking the lead, other nations will soon follow.
Should data centers be more effi cient? No doubt. They have been overprovisioned and overengineered and need a correction to refl ect modern realities. That said, data centers must avoid being miscast as the problem child of industry, spoilt and demanding more and more.
From design - why opt for Tier 3 when Tier 1 will do the job just as well? - to operation - is the premium of fi ve nines availability always worth the cost? - the sector has the means at its disposal to be more effi cient.
At the same time, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is technology advances from multicore processors, through solid state disk to virtualisation, that are driving effi ciencies that should be the envy of any other sector. Added to which technology itself delivers effi ciency at every level of industry, from manufacturing to distribution. By its very operation, a data center offsets carbon production elsewhere.
Other industries have been forced, by the market, to become ever- more effi cient. Think just-in-time manufacturing and shortened supply chains. That said, how a power utility can continue to lose 50%, 60%, 70% (any other bids?) of its product between generation and use remains a concern. Sprouting, as many did, from a monopolistic background probably helps.
If the CRC tax jolts the data center industry into action and brings a new level of competition to operations, then so much the better. No one likes paying tax and paying more than is necessary is just plain mad. Necessity is a fi ne motivator.
We know that switching off the data center is not an option. By being more effi cient, driving costs out of the business, and paying less tax mission-critical facilities will continue to be seen as providing a net benefi t to the business and the planet.
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Ambrose McNevin Editor
22
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