When you are going to hear that an Indian company opened its data centre in Himachal Pradesh? I think time is not far when government has allowed private players to install captive power plants and generate their own energy. The private players may choose to sell extra energy through state electricity board and so, government is encouraging power trading exchange to facilitate energy trading. However, the government is mulling on cap the power prices which I think is incorrect and it should be market driven. If the government caps power prices, it would not be driven by market dynamics and may not encourage players to install more power generating capacity but it is a separate discussion all together.
I was writing this piece on green computing when I learnt the news that Google has built its latest data centre on the Columbia River in Oregon so it can tap cheap hydroelectric power.
Green computing is one of the latest fads in the digital domain. Often, it’s dressed up as corporate responsibility and used as a marketing tool. Corporate computer-users may talk about reducing their carbon footprint to slow global warming, but what they really mean is finding ways to slash their electricity bills.
The fact is IT departments—especially those with data centres the size of aircraft hangars—have become huge consumers of electricity. Microsoft has done much the same in Washington state, and HSBC just built a data centre next to Niagara Falls.
Today, the industry finds that for every kilowatt of power it uses to drive a server, another kilowatt is needed to cool it. A decade ago, IT departments spent less than 20 cents out of every dollar of their budgets on powering and cooling their servers. That now absorbs about 50 cents per dollar. By 2010, the figure is expected to reach 70 cents.
That’s why you hear so much these days about “virtualisation”—an old trick for making one computer do the work of many. A number of “virtual machines” can coexist in separate partitions on a single server’s hard-drive, each as a software emulation of another server running its own operating system and software applications.
So, once SBI completes automation of all its branches across India, we may find then finance minister or finance secretary inaugurating SBI data Centre on a river with hydroelectricity potential.
- I read the news in The Economist magazine.
2 comments:
The facts quoted in the article are general knowledge or are taken from some other source?
If its the latter, pl provide the link to source. :)
being green is not only using greener means but it is the efficiency at which it is used.For example take electric car which runs on a battery claims to be greener is actually not. Efficiency of battery is much lower than that of an diesel or petrol engine. So if u are using 100 units of electricity to charge a battery it actually delivers 45-55 units of equivalent output. And so the electricity production requirement too increases. And how about environment friendliness of electricity production? So it actually ends on efficiency. Are you green?
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