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   On 10/3/11 Carbon3IT Ltd said:

   Peter, do you really think that this is good practice?, as you say its like turning the clock back.
   PUE is, as you know the facility power divided by the IT power, in this case the total facility power is likely to be much less than a conventional data (non icelandic) centre due to the free cooling element ONLY.
   Data Centre efficiency however is much much more than that, its virtualisation, its getting the servers do to their job using less power.
   DC energy efficiency has a long long way to go yet and its going to be driven by code, component embodied energy, component efficiency, management and new (yet to be derived) metrics.
   The EU Code of Conduct & CEEDA do NOT even recognise external power sources as being relevant, and even less for energy (heat) re-use, although they have both been raised for inclusion in the next version of the code. The energy efficiency is all about whats in the data centre, its how the server uses the energy supplied to do a compute job.
   To answer your question, yes it does matter, just because the energy is "carbon free" doesn't mean you should waste it, renewable energy and other efficiency measures walk hand in hand, a more efficient data centre drives down costs, which is a competitve advantage anywhere.
   One more point, if say a UK company moved their entire DC to Iceland, they would be able to reduce their energy and carbon costs, but due to the relatively undeveloped nature of the icelandic hinterland and a severe shortage of skills, (not many ITers in a population of 330,000!) plus limited fibre connectivity, unstable geology (volcanos and earthquakes), and a lack of compute manufacturers meaning high transport costs etc, means that this is a limited opportunity.

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