[CAnet - news] Excellent report on Internet Data Centers and Global Warming

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
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This is a good comprehensive report but surprisingly misses the entire
subject of Khazzoom-Brookes postulate (aka Jevons Paradox) which refutes the
entire argument of energy efficiency. Khazzoom-Brookes have effectively
demonstrated that improved efficiency actually results in increased energy
consumption as it decreases the overall cost of a product or service and
therefore increases demand.

For more details please see my blog on energy efficiency and data centers as
well a paper prepared in part for the OECD on this subject.  The OECD is
also having a workshop where this subject will be discusses in Denmark May
22-23.--BSA]

Paper on Khazzoom-Brookes postulate and datacenters
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgbgjrct_2767dxpbdvcf


Some excerpts from the McKinsey report 
http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/168/57

For many industries, data centers are one of the largest sources of
Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.  As a group, their overall emissions are
significant, in-scale with industries such as airlines.   Even with
immediate efficiency improvements (and adoption of new technologies)
enterprises and their equipment providers will face increased scrutiny given
the projected quadrupling of their data-center GHG emissions by 2020

Significant failings in asset management (6% average server utilization, 56%
facility utilization). Up to 30% of servers are dead [i.e. not being used at
all, but consuming power nevertheless]

Data center facilities spend (CapEx and OpEx) is a large, quickly  growing
and very inefficient portion of the total IT budget in many technology
intensive industries such as financial services and telecommunications. Some
intensive data center users will face meaningfully reduced profitability if
current trends continue

True costs are often 4-5x the cost of the server alone over a 5-10 year
lifetime of a server

Incremental US demand for data center energy between now and 2010 is
equivalent of 10 new power plants

EPA has advocated use of separate energy meters for large data centers 



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