Michael Geist on Canada's green cloud opportunity
From a cost perspective, the importance of better energy management is clear to anyone with responsibility for the energy bill, which in the data centre world has begun to include IT departments; however, the magnitude of this imperative has been investigated and quantified by Jonathan Koomey, a scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and professor at Stanford University. Based on historical analysis of the watts per $1000 dollars of server cost metric, Koomey has argued that watts per $1000 has doubled every five years over the past decade and will reach 50-200 watts per $1000 of capital investment within the next five years – at the upper end of this scale (200 watts), capital expense in the data centre shrinks to a third of overall cost, while electricity and related infrastructure costs surge to 60%. According to Koomey, this analysis reinforces the need for improved energy efficiency in the data centre – “powerful economic trends will push users” to embrace the cloud and “one of the main drivers of these trends is more efficient power use.”
