Some years ago, the carbon output of the ICT industry, and that is not just the vendors but every single organisation that runs a server, was under severe scrutiny. This was because a study had been released by Gartner which said that the ICT industry was responsible for 2% of carbon emissions globally. But then again, that was in 2007, before the economic unpleasantness which has been uppermost in the minds of anyone in business since.
Now that 2% was significant, because at the time, it put the ICT industry — albeit that term encompassed a fairly loosely associated bunch of organisations but did include data centres of all types — on par with the airline industry in terms of carbon belched forth.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, not least of which from this simple hack, who wrote an open letter to the relevant minister at the time (no reply), and many turned to the Lovejoy response and cried, “Won’t somebody please think of the children!”
Then of course, the economic world came crashing down about our very servers and Green IT gave way to simply surviving in an increasingly hostile business world. Now, heading into six years on from the economic meltdown and the methodologies, if not the principles, of Green IT are now reappearing.
At the time, many of us (yours truly included) were predicting how consumers and businesses alike would push the green agenda because people and companies would not want to be seen to do business with organisations that were killing the planet. In other words, should your organisation not have its carbon emissions under control in a verifiable way, then you would be unfit to do business in the wider world and you would wither or comply. This all gave way to simply surviving and that mentality sloughed away from people as the money in their pockets seemed somehow to disappear in an equally alarming way.
In the intervening period, other things have cropped up which mean that sustainability, one of those great tenets of the Green IT way, has reappeared, but not as it once was, because what also happened in the intervening period was social media.
For example, in 2007, Facebook was said to have had around 100,000 business pages and Twitter was barely a year old. At the end of 2012, Facebook had more than a billion users, while Twitter had more than half a billion users.
The age of the hyperscale data centre had arrived. However, this was a homogenous load data centre model where all the servers were doing the same thing. This was not millions of separate, differentiated workloads that needed as many combinations of applications and virtual machines to process them.
The result was that vendors began to see how they could create servers that were massively parallel, but relatively simple, and critically, consuming a lot less power, when compared to the beasts of the multi-job past.
ARM servers were rumoured, rubbished and then produced. Vendors such as HP developed systems such as Moonshot which were ultra-dense enclosures that constituted a data centre in a rack. And all of this was under the guise of sustainability because demand for social media, file sharing, image upload, music and video streaming, as characterised by the rise of instant availability of everything everywhere (Youtube, Spotify, Instagram, Dropbox, SkyDrive etc) which also occurred during the these same few years, meant that the old way of doing data centres was unsustainable.
There’s that word again: sustainable. But now it is not in the context of Green IT and carbon emission, but rather in the sense of limited power generation capability, limited distribution capability, exponentially increasing demand and money to be made.
And there is the rub: Green IT sensibilities have fallen by the wayside as lean years give way to potentially massive demand but only if the margins can be kept within reason — one of which being limited physical resources such as power, cooling and space — not in the race for Green credentials, once thought essential for dealing with the consumers of the future. Now the consumer of the future, or today’s consumer as we can now call them, is more interested in whether you’ve paid you corporate tax or not, or whether you’re latest viral marketing campaign was sufficiently hip.
The upshot of all this is that while power efficiency is a worthy goal, its pursuit is not really in the interests of the environment anymore, but rather in being able to meet insatiable demand within a reasonable margin and on limited resources. It is not about doing more with less, it is about getting as much as possible out of what’s available — not really the same thing.
Perhaps there is a job to be done in educating people as to what it costs to post a tweet, or update Facebook or put a picture of kittens on Instagram. Perhaps out insatiable demand is the problem and should be dealt with accordingly. Either way, the face of the data centre is changing significantly and one thing is sure, while people may not be thinking of the children, they will be thinking about all that demand and how to make money out of it.
And on that note, I want to wish everyone, of every persuasion a happy, peaceful and enjoyable mid-winter, however you celebrate, mark or spend it.
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