Green servers in growing markets will lead to more power consumption - by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 30 2010)

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   The wave to build low(er)-power servers is a good thing, but be advised it will ultimately lead to more power being generated and consumed on a global basis -- which is one reason why we need to move out of the "green" cliché and onto a broader and more holistic view of sustainable data centers.

   Low-power hardware, simply put, enable servers to be put places where you would not normally think to deploy a small to mid-sized data center.   If you're not building a "mega-center" on the scale of Facebook, Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, you can easily tuck away a data center into a closet or a small office or a floor of a building. 

   Why would you do that? To be closer to your customers for certain applications -- the financial community is notorious for trying to shave milliseconds off of application time, so some firms may be especially tempted to see if they can "squeeze" a facility closer to a trading floor or office, rather than backhauling data to a larger data center, processing it, and then sending the results back to a trader's desk.

   Or, a service provider will need to deliver applications within an area that doesn't have huge amounts of broadband and/or broadband is relatively expensive.  It then makes more sense to do as much processing as possible locally, rather than taking it off-shore.

   Two words: IBM, Africa.

   Last month, IBM won a 10-year deal with Bharti Airtel to supply computing technology and services for an upgraded cell phone network across 16 nations in Africa.   Over the last five years, IBM has invested $300 million in the region to build data centers, add country offices, and promote technology training programs.

   IBM believes Africa is the next major emerging growth market and the company is targeting compute-heavy applications including telecommunications, banking, health care, transportation and energy, says a New York Times blog.  With mobile phones driving commerce, there's a big need for backend servers to handle transactions.

   Like it or not, you have to put more servers in.  With low-power servers, you can build smaller, more efficient data centers and cost-effectively equip them with backup power.    The challenge becomes making sure local data centers in growth markets are powered by reliable and sustainable power, rather than simply cranking up a cheap dirty carbon source because it's there.

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