Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Sustainable Data Warehouse

Yesterday at the lecture we heard that transportation was a big part of the total energy consumption in a media company. Besides from that, electricity was also a big part of the energy beeing used. Depending on the the company, the use of electricity might be different and I assume that consumtion of electricity in computer related companies are relatively high.

One way to not consume "bad", non-renewable energy for electricity is to do what Apple are planning on doing for one of thier data warehouses. They are setting up solar panels that will generate energy worth 60 percent of their total consumption for the data warehouse. I think this is a good initiative since data warehouses generally consume a lot of electricity, and solving it in this way seems much more sustainable.

Though, I see one problem with other companies following this initiative and that is that these solar panels take up a lot of space and this is just for one Apple data warehouse. And also that the energy generated from these solar panels could instead be genereting electricity for 10 874 homes. That makes you understand how big of an energy consumer these data warehouses are, and this one is just one of Apples.

This is a sustainable way of running a data warehouse, but when seeing this I am starting to question how sustainable data warehouses are in general and that the continuing growth of these pose a problem for ICT in relation to sustainability.


Link:
http://www.apple.com/environment/renewable-energy/

1 comment:

  1. Ding

    Yes, data warehouses are a big energy consumer - and yet it is still more economical to let data centers do the heavy numbers crunching rather than our (comparatively) ineffective personal computers...

    ReplyDelete