Information has a Big Footprint

According to a post by Bits, the New York Times tech blog, air travel might lose its top billing in the polluters’ revue. Moving up the marquee to headline the greenhouse gas show . . . data centers. That’s right, buildings full of humming computers and spinning hard drives, cooled by the constant flow of conditioned air, are sucking enough energy to set them on a path for carbon emission stardom by 2020. As much as our move away from paper might have helped, we now have to wonder whether the electronic, binary alternative is a real improvement.

Data Centers require a great deal of energy to store all that information (blogs to financials, emails to images). However, unsurprisingly, inefficiency is the greatest portion of the problem. Most servers use relatively little of the drive space available to them, but their energy use is the same regardless of capacity. It is like driving an SUV with only one person in it. Without this inefficient use of space, data centers might be able to avoid supplanting the air travel giants.

Much like we have discussed, the challenge is to make efficiency tangible. There is currently, according to Bits, a proposal for a standardized efficiency rating for data centers. This is the kind of thing we need to see across the board. Numerical, understandable representations of efficiency and conservation. If one can judge a data center’s efficiency at a glance, on can more easily make the choice to improve conditions at a current location before opening another center to add to the width of information’s giant foot.

Any techies out there want to offer some insight or hope on this issue? Is it possible to make data centers sustainable in a low energy future? Talk about it in the comments.

Nic Darling is the marketing guy for a data backup software company. This will occasionally bleed into his guest blogging.