Green clouds are all about scale
October 17, 2012
Do data centers that run on clean power seem like pipe dreams? Not when companies hit the massive scales of webscale computing. Execs creating business models from green data centers say that it’s the large size of the projects that makes clean power attractive.
Two execs building businesses around renewable energy-powered data centers said at GigaOM’s Structure Europe event in Amsterdam on Tuesday that the key to driving clean power for data centers is scale. Both Tate Cantrell, CTO of Verne Global, and Eirikur Hrafnsson, founder of GreenQloud, run companies that sell green data center services to IT companies across large computing facilities, which are able to aggregate clean power cost effectively over a large scale…
Apple was only able to build such a large solar plant to power its data center in North Carolina because it’s doing computing at such a massive scale there, said Cantrell. It just wouldn’t be cost effective for a smaller data center operator to build its own clean power project, he added…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/green-clouds-are-all-about-scale-2/