NY Times on Data Center Energy Usage

The New York Times has a story this morning on energy usage in data centers, titled Taming The Guzzlers That Power the World Wide Web. The article by Matthew Wald doesn’t contain anything that would be new to data center professionals who have been tracking power issues and the industry’s recent focus on energy efficiency, but is a useful overview for those just joining the discussion. Sources from Hewlett-Packard, Google, Sun Microsystems and Emerson Electric are included, along with data from the EPA report to Congress.

Despite the “guzzlers” reference in the headline, the story includes a perspective that’s often missing from coverage of data center energy trends. “The environmental news isn’t all bad,” Wald writes. “When people use the Internet to shop or to work at home, they are using less energy to move themselves and their goods around, offsetting some of the energy used for computers.”

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.