| Including Savvis, who hosts gardenweb - they maintain a dozen or so large datacenters. Some operators are "greener" than others - Savvis isn't known as one, but Google is trying. They have been locating datacenters near bodies of water large enough to be capable of sinking the heat without affecting the ecosystem, and using the natural cooling instead of 100% refrigeration. They also have wind and solar power initiatives in place to try and produce as much of their own energy as possible. But yeah, this interweb is a serious power drain. Never mind the datacenters, consider all of the computers running in homes (essentially space heaters running most of the time) that those centers are designed to support. It may be distributed, but it's energy impact is much, much larger - those computers in the facilities don't have monitors. |
