Trends: Cloud Computing and Content Management: Fascinating commentary of how environmentalism and “cloud computing” relate. It discusses how cloud computing and the “you never have to throw anything away” mentality contribute to what seems to be an ecological disaster. Bytes on disk, it turns out, are not free, either in a financial or environmental sense.
In fact Cloud Computing simply means moving things to big and bigger Data Centers. Data Centers are anything but fluffy. They are huge, energy-sucking giants — many the size of small towns. They are environmental disasters and the only thing fluffy about them is the C02 emissions they belch out. Data Centers will in time according to The Uptime Institute become bigger polluters than the aviation industry. Data Centers require massive amounts of energy to operate — often as much energy is used to cool the centers as to power them. All that heat has to go somewhere. If you think your air conditioning unit is an ecological no-no, then consider the AC demands on a data center the size of 5 football fields […]
The argument at the end is that efficient email archiving management can reduce your stored email by 90%.
