Affect of Government’s Plan to Cut Carbon Dioxide Pollution on Cloud Computing and Data Centers

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

The White House plan to cut carbon dioxide pollution by 30% seeks to meet its goals, in part, through efficiency improvements. This could put further pressure on data centers to improve efficiency, many of which are powering servers that are doing very little work or none at all.

For instance, a recent Uptime Institute survey asked enterprise data professionals: "What percentage of your servers are likely comatose?" About 60% of respondents said the number of comatose servers was under 5%. But nearly 25% put at least 10% of their servers were into that category…

The problem may be bigger than the Uptime survey indicates. "Most data center operators can’t even tell you how many servers they have never mind their utilization, so caution in interpreting those numbers is indicated," said Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University. "The percentages for comatose servers are likely much bigger."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248791/EPA_urges_efficiency_many_data_centers_still_far_from_it_