2011 was an interesting year for the container data center space. There were several new entrants (modular), a maturing in the industry of where they fit into the grand scheme of data centers and an evolution by the existing manufacturers into the next generations of their initial offerings.
I will list the vendors that I know about and have met with and personally verified that their offering is in fact the real deal. This is a list and not a ranking by the way. If you want my personal professional opinion on this then track me down off the record:
CirraScale (f/k/a/ Verari)
HP
Dell
Blade Room
I/O
SmartCube
Elliptical Mobile Solutions (EMS)
SGI/Rackable
I am sure I will get calls from the vendors who will read the post and make 'corrections' to my positioning and commentary but I am vendor NEUTRAL and I have met with, seen, and in some cases sold one of these so my experiences and comments are based on seeing, smelling, and experiencing the products and the people who work for the companies who make them. Everyone has their own secret sauce, I get it. I also get that I am one of the few people on the planet who has not worked for a vendor who has any longevity in covering and paying attention to the space, so my comments are solely mine, as are my opinions.
The overall maturity in the space has gone from containers, to a true modular design, with the biggest difference being that modular units are the needed hybrid between the container and the traditional stick built data center. Essentially they are a data center built in a factory, vs. a data center retrofitted on site.
The bigger issue in adoption of this class of data center solution, I believe, is that companies have no single organization to turn to for evaluating if their needs are better served by a container, a modular design, or a traditional data center. The skillsets needed to evaluate the solutions require IT, facilities, real estate, electrical systems, cooling, site prep/construction, permitting, and finance skills. Since many large customers have people with these skillsets it is arguably easier to tap into the knowledge base, however politics can derail things quickly. That and an IBM container salesperson does not get paid to tout the HP Ecopod's features and benefits so it is vendor lock from the get go and that scares the sh*t out of most CTO/CIO's. The don't run just ___________ gear.
Let's get real for a moment - if the vendors wanted to eat their own dog food (or wear their own outfits), they would. HP would never build another data center, nor would IBM, I/O, or anyone else with the offering of the physical and operational components under one roof. They would be consolidating in droves out of their facilities into containers and that would would be a clear and consistent path forward. It would also be the smartest thing financially they could do.
The only issue is that none of their larger customers runs just that vendor's gear to support their business so it's a religious sell to get someone to convert, or you're taking an oval peg and jamming it in a round hole.
I have spent a fair amount of time looking hard at modular solutions - very different from a container- since it is close to a traditional data center by accepting 19 or 24 inch racks of ANY manufacturers hardware that you would put in a stick built facility, the biggest difference is that the data center is built in a factory so there is nothing to tour ahead of time in most cases. For some people this is a deal breaker, for others it doesn't matter since the absolute and measurable consistency of product, cost, and financial aspects trump the inability to walk through something.
As for the financial aspects of all of these NSB (non-stick-built) solutions, a modular data center is TOUGH to beat. In one recent study I saw the cost of a retrofit was ~$22M per megawatt. This is 4x the capital cost of the same power footprint of a modular solution. 400% and that is not a typo. On the OpEx (power/cooling/operation) side the modular designs deliver a PUE of 1.2 consistently. Knowing what I know about air flow and pimping the data center floor with different efficiency gaining tricks of the trade, I would think you get lower. Contrast that with a 2.0-3.0 PUE in traditional and older facilities you can cut your costs in half.
One of the most compelling examples I have thought about was based on a 20 megawatt proposed project. That's 20,000 Kw - plus a greenfield build cost of ~$2,000/foot. That's likely a 180,000 square foot size building (conservatively). So using back of the napkin math, that's roughly a $360 million dollar project that has to be COMMITTED to up front. Yes it would be built and financed in phases, but who wants a $360M obligation on their financial statement today. Especially when 20MW of a modular solution can be delivered for roughly $160M. No - not a typo. That is $200M less off the top and out of the gate. Operationally it's 14.2M in electricity (in North Carolina - a marketed cheap power state) for a 2.0 PUE facility vs. $8.5M/year for a 1.2 PUE modular. Thats $6M/year less. So dollars in over a 10 year period is $500M vs. $245M. I am no mathemetician but that's a big difference.
If you would like to discuss in any detail - ping me. I have sold a container to NASA, consulted on RFI and RFP documents for intelligence and military applications, and am truly vendor neutral. I am running out of reasons to believe that the modular solutions are anything BUT the way to deliver data centers. Technically, financially, and environmentally. I love this evolution.
Others are taking note as referenced by a study Digital Realty Trust paid for to take the temperature of the data center growth patterns. The interesting nugget was that 41% of companies surveyed were looking at containers and/or modular solutions. Smart move.
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Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Cloud Computing is the growth engine for the data center business
I was in Washington DC last week to meet with several cloud companies, walk one of them through my Silver Spring Maryland Data Center and network at the GovCloud event being held in DC. If you have read my blog at all over the past several years you will quickly figure out that I was not a fan of cloud. I didn't get it because it wasn't mature enough to offer anything better than what I could get at a managed services provider like Savvis/CenturyLink, or latisys (as examples).
What I saw last week has turned me on to what cloud delivers. Cloud computing, and the companies who embrace it, have gone from promising the world and delivering little, to actually looking at the architecture, looking at 'what if's' based on actual IT requirements, applying financial filters to the noise and coming up with a consumable offering.
One of the companies I met with - Piston Cloud - had a solid offering built on Open Stack. I knew their CEO Josh when he was at NASA and I was at CoreSite and we started a big ole sandbox for cloud companies (Eucalyptus, RightScale, etc) to tie into what NASA was doing as well as get their software optimized on hardware platforms. HP was the dominant hardware vendor at the time. Fast forward and I left CoreSite to found a data center company and Josh left NASA to take what he had done at NASA and mature it into a commercially viable cloud OS and start Piston Cloud.
Our meeting was the first time we had connected face to face in a couple of years and we picked up where we left off. There was some reminiscing and laughing at mistakes we had made along the way in getting to where we were and there was something else - an electricity that was palpable when we shifted the discussion to actually using cloud to deliver a real solution - not just 'we do cloud'.
I live in the pipes and boxes/buildings that cloud resources use to provide the elasticity and scalability native to a cloud environment. One of my pet peeves was always the lack of discussion around security, having played in the IDM/Access control space with some large companies a few years ago. The data center I bought bucked the trend in a number of ways and I always believed the cloud vendors would mature and come back to earth and look at not only their public/private/hybrid offering but where they put their environments in the first place. So the data center I bought was NOT in Northern Virginia with 50 other providers, but in Maryland - the other State with hardened bunkers for Government and Military personnel in the event there was a major 'Oh Shit' again. The facility also had a global bank as a tenant so I know the security and the validation of the security would be embedded in the design of the facility - and I was right.
So when Josh and I sat down to talk cloud - and security - Piston Cloud was at a different layer in the stack, but also focused on a hardened solution for the cloud - in their case a hardened OS. Long story short, our core beliefs were embedded in what we were doing - delivering the possibility and the option of a secure Cloud OS from a secure facility with the audit trails to prove it.
There is much more to be discussed but it was great to see another company founder develop a solution that was centered around their core beliefs - security in the cloud is a problem, so let's fix the problem and go to market. I will blog more as time and NDA's allow, but for organizations enamored with the cloud - welcome. And for those organizations really looking for a secure option, I think we may have something worth talking (and blogging) about.
What I saw last week has turned me on to what cloud delivers. Cloud computing, and the companies who embrace it, have gone from promising the world and delivering little, to actually looking at the architecture, looking at 'what if's' based on actual IT requirements, applying financial filters to the noise and coming up with a consumable offering.
One of the companies I met with - Piston Cloud - had a solid offering built on Open Stack. I knew their CEO Josh when he was at NASA and I was at CoreSite and we started a big ole sandbox for cloud companies (Eucalyptus, RightScale, etc) to tie into what NASA was doing as well as get their software optimized on hardware platforms. HP was the dominant hardware vendor at the time. Fast forward and I left CoreSite to found a data center company and Josh left NASA to take what he had done at NASA and mature it into a commercially viable cloud OS and start Piston Cloud.
Our meeting was the first time we had connected face to face in a couple of years and we picked up where we left off. There was some reminiscing and laughing at mistakes we had made along the way in getting to where we were and there was something else - an electricity that was palpable when we shifted the discussion to actually using cloud to deliver a real solution - not just 'we do cloud'.
I live in the pipes and boxes/buildings that cloud resources use to provide the elasticity and scalability native to a cloud environment. One of my pet peeves was always the lack of discussion around security, having played in the IDM/Access control space with some large companies a few years ago. The data center I bought bucked the trend in a number of ways and I always believed the cloud vendors would mature and come back to earth and look at not only their public/private/hybrid offering but where they put their environments in the first place. So the data center I bought was NOT in Northern Virginia with 50 other providers, but in Maryland - the other State with hardened bunkers for Government and Military personnel in the event there was a major 'Oh Shit' again. The facility also had a global bank as a tenant so I know the security and the validation of the security would be embedded in the design of the facility - and I was right.
So when Josh and I sat down to talk cloud - and security - Piston Cloud was at a different layer in the stack, but also focused on a hardened solution for the cloud - in their case a hardened OS. Long story short, our core beliefs were embedded in what we were doing - delivering the possibility and the option of a secure Cloud OS from a secure facility with the audit trails to prove it.
There is much more to be discussed but it was great to see another company founder develop a solution that was centered around their core beliefs - security in the cloud is a problem, so let's fix the problem and go to market. I will blog more as time and NDA's allow, but for organizations enamored with the cloud - welcome. And for those organizations really looking for a secure option, I think we may have something worth talking (and blogging) about.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Cloud Security - Is cloud the industry Monorail?
For those of you not familiar with the Simpsons animated TV series, the title of the entry comes from Episode 413 - Marge vs. the Monorail. It became a widely used reference for ideas that could not stand up to logic, but became real when people's passions overtook their logic. In a nutshell - After Mr. Burns is caught storing his excess nuclear waste inside Springfield Park’s trees, he is ordered to pay the town $3 million. The town is originally set to agree to fix Main Street, but the charismatic Lyle Lanley interrupts and convinces the town to use the money to buy one of his monorails. Of course it doesn't work as advertised and there is a major safety issue that ends up threatening the town.
So what does this have to do with cloud?
Cloud is the latest IT buzzword that is having massive dollars thrown at it in an effort to provide all sorts of things, flexibility, elasticity, new paradigms of computing, the list goes on. What cloud didn't do early on was provide sufficient security, and so a new moniker was thrown out - the Private Cloud. That was the veneer on security for the cloud. Then cloud evolved again to hybrid cloud where you could mix and match Private Cloud and Public cloud based on the data that was involved. Ta da! We fixed it. Or so we thought.
Look, I get cloud. I love the idea of cloud. I think we will see the development and creation of even more paradigms that evolve over time but let's not forget the basic tenets of moving things outside the castle walls:
1. You are buying an SLA (Service Level Agreement). You are not buying a Cloud.
2. You are buying Risk. You are not buying a solution
3. Your Cloud will only do what it is designed to do. If your processes suck, the will suck in the Cloud too
When I read articles about outages - especially cloud outages - I look a lot deeper at what happened. Customers seem baffled (a.k.a. pissed off) that the cloud went down. I ask, well, did you design it to include the movement of data, workload, storage, and ultimately were you willing to pay for a level of redundancy you THOUGHT was included but wasn't? Remember you bought the SLA. You paid for the risk you were willing to accept. You made the call. The cloud did what it was supposed to. Failed when the site when down.
In all of the articles I have read, I have not seen any coverage of the type or tier of facility the Cloud is housed in? I'll bet I could offer Cloud served from the island of Jamaica for pennies and I would get laughed at. However if I offered cloud for pennies - my sales people's phone would ring off the hook. What's the difference? Disclosure. Assessing risk. And not assuming that the Cloud is what you THINK it is.
The Cloud is what you design and pay for. Whether it's in Jamaica in the back room of a Rum Bar or in a Tier IV facility in Silver Spring MD. The rules that are in the real world still apply in the Cloud world.
If it's highly valuable, treat it that way, and design it accordingly. Don't buy a monorail, no matter who is selling it.
So what does this have to do with cloud?
Cloud is the latest IT buzzword that is having massive dollars thrown at it in an effort to provide all sorts of things, flexibility, elasticity, new paradigms of computing, the list goes on. What cloud didn't do early on was provide sufficient security, and so a new moniker was thrown out - the Private Cloud. That was the veneer on security for the cloud. Then cloud evolved again to hybrid cloud where you could mix and match Private Cloud and Public cloud based on the data that was involved. Ta da! We fixed it. Or so we thought.
Look, I get cloud. I love the idea of cloud. I think we will see the development and creation of even more paradigms that evolve over time but let's not forget the basic tenets of moving things outside the castle walls:
1. You are buying an SLA (Service Level Agreement). You are not buying a Cloud.
2. You are buying Risk. You are not buying a solution
3. Your Cloud will only do what it is designed to do. If your processes suck, the will suck in the Cloud too
When I read articles about outages - especially cloud outages - I look a lot deeper at what happened. Customers seem baffled (a.k.a. pissed off) that the cloud went down. I ask, well, did you design it to include the movement of data, workload, storage, and ultimately were you willing to pay for a level of redundancy you THOUGHT was included but wasn't? Remember you bought the SLA. You paid for the risk you were willing to accept. You made the call. The cloud did what it was supposed to. Failed when the site when down.
In all of the articles I have read, I have not seen any coverage of the type or tier of facility the Cloud is housed in? I'll bet I could offer Cloud served from the island of Jamaica for pennies and I would get laughed at. However if I offered cloud for pennies - my sales people's phone would ring off the hook. What's the difference? Disclosure. Assessing risk. And not assuming that the Cloud is what you THINK it is.
The Cloud is what you design and pay for. Whether it's in Jamaica in the back room of a Rum Bar or in a Tier IV facility in Silver Spring MD. The rules that are in the real world still apply in the Cloud world.
If it's highly valuable, treat it that way, and design it accordingly. Don't buy a monorail, no matter who is selling it.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
PUE, DCiE, and other stuff that doesn't matter much...
The Gartner conference was one of their best attended events in 2011 proving yet again that the space is hot, appears to have a bright future, and like the other hot sectors before it, is trying to mature through the development of standardized measurements that will be embraced by vendors, users, and analysts and give owner-operators bragging rights and a new area to compete in. PUE, DCiE and other yardsticks are competing for the 'best' yardstick for efficiency.
Sorry to pee in your Wheaties folks - we already have one. Cash.
I have done enough deals to know that PUE matters before financial analysts get involved. Once they do it comes down to costs. Total costs. Lowest cost wins. Not every time, but show me a CFO who authorizes paying more for something than its worth as a rule.
I will also put a caveat in to say that this is more true of multi tenant facilities than single tenant facilities. Single tenant/purpose built data centers can do what they want so long as it makes financial sense and delivers on the business objectives for the company and THAT company only. Multi tenant facilities must be far more INCLUSIVE of a wider array of requirements to service the greatest number of clients and their desires.
Both Single and multi tenant data centers will have a mix of manufacturers, densities, layouts, loads and preferences. The multi tenant facility needs to factor in broad compliance, placement of densities, weight, and other highly variable nuances. Like Rick on Pawn Stars says - 'You never know what is going to walk through that door.'
Sorry to pee in your Wheaties folks - we already have one. Cash.
I have done enough deals to know that PUE matters before financial analysts get involved. Once they do it comes down to costs. Total costs. Lowest cost wins. Not every time, but show me a CFO who authorizes paying more for something than its worth as a rule.
I will also put a caveat in to say that this is more true of multi tenant facilities than single tenant facilities. Single tenant/purpose built data centers can do what they want so long as it makes financial sense and delivers on the business objectives for the company and THAT company only. Multi tenant facilities must be far more INCLUSIVE of a wider array of requirements to service the greatest number of clients and their desires.
Both Single and multi tenant data centers will have a mix of manufacturers, densities, layouts, loads and preferences. The multi tenant facility needs to factor in broad compliance, placement of densities, weight, and other highly variable nuances. Like Rick on Pawn Stars says - 'You never know what is going to walk through that door.'
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Gartner Data Center Conference brain dump...
I just got back from 3 1/2 days in Las Vegas at the Gartner Data Center Conference, and will be writing about many of the things they presented, only in a lot more detail. In fact that was the #1 piece of feedback I heard was that the presentations are more sizzle than steak, and that they have to do a WHOLE lot more in providing the details about what they present.
Monday's keynote was pretty good and was given by Dave Cappuccio. It covered many stats and numbers that were fun to listen to, and I thought it was a decent way to ease into a conference. Some of the interesting nuggets I heard:
30,000,000,000 (billion) pieces of content were added to Facebook in the past month
Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015 - care to guess why?
Data Centers consume 100 times more electricity than the offices they support
The percentage of a college student's texting to phone call ratio is 98.4% to 1.6%
Within 4 years the bandwidth I/O per rack will increase 25x
Needless to say this is all pointing to growth - whether a company is prepared for it or not. There are some other topics I will be jumping into over the next few weeks as Gartner left a lot to be desired and discussed and in some cases were pretty off. So Stay tuned and lets see what I come up with once I shake the red eye jet lag...
Monday's keynote was pretty good and was given by Dave Cappuccio. It covered many stats and numbers that were fun to listen to, and I thought it was a decent way to ease into a conference. Some of the interesting nuggets I heard:
30,000,000,000 (billion) pieces of content were added to Facebook in the past month
Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015 - care to guess why?
Data Centers consume 100 times more electricity than the offices they support
The percentage of a college student's texting to phone call ratio is 98.4% to 1.6%
Within 4 years the bandwidth I/O per rack will increase 25x
Needless to say this is all pointing to growth - whether a company is prepared for it or not. There are some other topics I will be jumping into over the next few weeks as Gartner left a lot to be desired and discussed and in some cases were pretty off. So Stay tuned and lets see what I come up with once I shake the red eye jet lag...
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Is innovation exclusively for single tenant datacenters?
I am a data center geek. I love to read about them, see who is doing what, learn about new stuff and approaches that are being implemented - all of it. What I have begun to notice is that the innovation that is happening - while totally awesome - will never fly in 95 out of 100 facilities in the world. I have begun to ask the question 'why' to other geeks and data center users.
Without question the number one response is - because when you run a single tenant facility you can take risks and do things that mitigate a common set of risks - and since one company pays, they can do what makes sense for their business alone.
Others include - 'because they have an innovation budget'; 'it's about controlling their destiny'; 'the penalties for an outage are not as severe as outside the single tenant walls'.
In my opinion I think it has to do with a combination of factors - most of which have been mentioned above with one exception - evolution. As companies move from a cabinet in the ghetto colo company, they evolve to require more choices and options, different configurations, and vendors who deal with companies the size they hope to become. Once they scale up to ~10MW (100,000 square feet) they evolve into looking at finish to suits and finally building their own. Why do I think this?
I saw it happen with Facebook. They started by leasing cabinets in a few key markets, scaling that, then taking cages, then taking suites, then floors of buildings and now are building their own. Their headcount for their data center operation grew to that of a mid size provider, and there does come a point where it is more cost effective to build your own than to have to keep moving like a shark looking for open suites, floors, or whitespace.
I have seen it happen in reverse with many banks too. They built their own and leased where they wanted, acquired with abandon, and then had an impressive footprint. Then they figured out - as many did - that the network was more important than real estate and so the consolidation began where they wanted to consolidate into fewer huge footprint super centers because it was more effective to run a few huge facilities vs. dozens of all different sizes.
So when I think about why does all of the innovation appear to happen in the huge facilities, I look at the evolution of Apple, Facebook, Google, ING, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, etc. and they all find a different path to the same location - a risk averse facility that makes economical sense. Innovation is tied to reducing risk or cost and when you are the only one who has to live with the decisions and their outcome, single tenant facilities will continue to out-innovate the multi-tenant facilities since they have an exponentially larger set of risks and requirements to service.
What do you think?
Without question the number one response is - because when you run a single tenant facility you can take risks and do things that mitigate a common set of risks - and since one company pays, they can do what makes sense for their business alone.
Others include - 'because they have an innovation budget'; 'it's about controlling their destiny'; 'the penalties for an outage are not as severe as outside the single tenant walls'.
In my opinion I think it has to do with a combination of factors - most of which have been mentioned above with one exception - evolution. As companies move from a cabinet in the ghetto colo company, they evolve to require more choices and options, different configurations, and vendors who deal with companies the size they hope to become. Once they scale up to ~10MW (100,000 square feet) they evolve into looking at finish to suits and finally building their own. Why do I think this?
I saw it happen with Facebook. They started by leasing cabinets in a few key markets, scaling that, then taking cages, then taking suites, then floors of buildings and now are building their own. Their headcount for their data center operation grew to that of a mid size provider, and there does come a point where it is more cost effective to build your own than to have to keep moving like a shark looking for open suites, floors, or whitespace.
I have seen it happen in reverse with many banks too. They built their own and leased where they wanted, acquired with abandon, and then had an impressive footprint. Then they figured out - as many did - that the network was more important than real estate and so the consolidation began where they wanted to consolidate into fewer huge footprint super centers because it was more effective to run a few huge facilities vs. dozens of all different sizes.
So when I think about why does all of the innovation appear to happen in the huge facilities, I look at the evolution of Apple, Facebook, Google, ING, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, etc. and they all find a different path to the same location - a risk averse facility that makes economical sense. Innovation is tied to reducing risk or cost and when you are the only one who has to live with the decisions and their outcome, single tenant facilities will continue to out-innovate the multi-tenant facilities since they have an exponentially larger set of risks and requirements to service.
What do you think?
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Google's Data Centers use 26 Megawatts - What's the fuss?
In the past 24 hours there has been a ton of press about Google's announcement that they use 26 million watts of electricity. Put another way, that is 26 Megawatts, and put another way, what is all the fuss about over 26 megwatts?
Is it that they ONLY use 26 Megwatts?
It it that Google is so efficient that they run this gigantic brand on such a small amount of electricity?
That has to be it, because folks, 26 megawatts in the data center business is a medium size operation.
Just for comparison's sake, Vantage data centers is building a campus twice that size in Santa Clara. Digital Realty Trust has a project in Dallas that is 4 TIMES that size to service clients. Bytegrid Holdings LLC has a 9.6 megawatt facility about one third the size of Google's entire operation. Just sayin'.
What I also have yet to review fully is the carbon footprint. It was mentioned in another, better, article that they get 25% of their electricity from renewable sources. Not LOW CARBON sources, but renewable sources. The thing I have paid attention to for years is what I call the carbon chain - what is the carbon footprint from start to finish on a project, and then the impact on an ongoing operational basis. And I'm sorry buying a carbon credit doesn't count. That's like buying recycled paper with Monopoly money.
It mentions that Google builds their own facilities. What about the carbon it takes to manufacture the steel, the concrete, the copper, and other raw materials used in a facility? Then there is the transportation. How many trucks filled with diesel are trucking in heavy loads of new equipment that was produced from scratch and had to source the raw materials, and you get the picture.
Why not re-use a facility as a rule vs build new? Why not cap the radius of transport of newly manufactured goods to 100 miles or less? Why not look at the whole impact and subsequent carbon footprint and measure and improve that? Just sayin'...
Still, great numbers by Google.
And a side note to Noah Horowitz at the Natural Resources Defense Council who '...cautioned that despite the advent of increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing tools, electricity use at data centers was still rising, as every major corporation now relied on them. He said the figures did not include the electricity drawn by the personal computers, tablets and iPhones that use information from Google’s data centers.
“When we hit the Google search button,” Mr. Horowitz said, “it’s not for free.”
Trying to link energy usage of other corporations, personal computers, and iPhones to Google's numbers is like blaming a person's alcoholism on the fermentation process. It's a stretch at best. And what are you going to do to stop this reckless usage of the most efficient data center footprint on the planet, stop Googling? Didn't think so. Me neither.
Nothings free, but this is data that shows if we are going to search and want to be green about it, Go Green, Go Google.
Is it that they ONLY use 26 Megwatts?
It it that Google is so efficient that they run this gigantic brand on such a small amount of electricity?
That has to be it, because folks, 26 megawatts in the data center business is a medium size operation.
Just for comparison's sake, Vantage data centers is building a campus twice that size in Santa Clara. Digital Realty Trust has a project in Dallas that is 4 TIMES that size to service clients. Bytegrid Holdings LLC has a 9.6 megawatt facility about one third the size of Google's entire operation. Just sayin'.
What I also have yet to review fully is the carbon footprint. It was mentioned in another, better, article that they get 25% of their electricity from renewable sources. Not LOW CARBON sources, but renewable sources. The thing I have paid attention to for years is what I call the carbon chain - what is the carbon footprint from start to finish on a project, and then the impact on an ongoing operational basis. And I'm sorry buying a carbon credit doesn't count. That's like buying recycled paper with Monopoly money.
It mentions that Google builds their own facilities. What about the carbon it takes to manufacture the steel, the concrete, the copper, and other raw materials used in a facility? Then there is the transportation. How many trucks filled with diesel are trucking in heavy loads of new equipment that was produced from scratch and had to source the raw materials, and you get the picture.
Why not re-use a facility as a rule vs build new? Why not cap the radius of transport of newly manufactured goods to 100 miles or less? Why not look at the whole impact and subsequent carbon footprint and measure and improve that? Just sayin'...
Still, great numbers by Google.
And a side note to Noah Horowitz at the Natural Resources Defense Council who '...cautioned that despite the advent of increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing tools, electricity use at data centers was still rising, as every major corporation now relied on them. He said the figures did not include the electricity drawn by the personal computers, tablets and iPhones that use information from Google’s data centers.
“When we hit the Google search button,” Mr. Horowitz said, “it’s not for free.”
Trying to link energy usage of other corporations, personal computers, and iPhones to Google's numbers is like blaming a person's alcoholism on the fermentation process. It's a stretch at best. And what are you going to do to stop this reckless usage of the most efficient data center footprint on the planet, stop Googling? Didn't think so. Me neither.
Nothings free, but this is data that shows if we are going to search and want to be green about it, Go Green, Go Google.
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