Giga Om on the NYT data center articles

Katie Fehrenbacher over at GigaOm did a service for those of us interested in data centers by compiling some of the issues with the recent New York Times article.  She summarizes her conclusions (with which I agree) here:

I feel the same way about the NYT’s series that I do about Greenpeace’s dirty cloud reports. Yeah, they got a few things wrong, but the overall thesis is right, and can be used to make the Internet industry even more conscientious about their carbon emissions and energy footprint.

There are still a few Internet leaders who haven’t publicly embraced energy efficiency and greener technologies for data centers. For example, Amazon and its web services haven’t really stepped up to touting energy efficiency and clean power technologies so far, despite its prominent role in the industry. Though, they have made some strides.

Additionally while the largest and leading Internet companies have widely adopted energy efficiency practices, businesses running their own IT services haven’t adopted these technologies. That’s one of the biggest problems with the article, that the reporter is lumping together businesses’ in house IT server practices, with the webscale cloud giants. But clearly there’s still a lot more work to be done when it comes to the Internet an its massive power consumption.

I applaud Jim Glanz of the NYT for shining a light on the need for greater energy efficiency in data centers, but feel strongly that tackling the problem will require critical insights that someone just reading that article would not pick up.  Let’s hope this is the beginning of a deeper conversation about these issues.

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