Toolkit
Story: The green data centre: An oxymoron?
environmentally friendly people: an oxymoron
This article makes a great point but I think it is important we keep a couple of things in mind.
First and foremost, we are not an environmentally friendly species. There are just so many of us it may be that we never will be. To stretch the 4-wheel drive analogy, we could even revert to using horses but they would still produce methane.
However, it is important that we focus on minimising our impact and try to work towards sustainability as much as we possibly can. The Stern report did a good thing by reinforcing just how unsustainable our lifestyles were.
The same applies to IT but to a lesser extent - not because the resource demands from the IT industry isn't growing exponentially - but because it also present the developed world with opportunities to change our work & life practices to be less resource centric (travel less, use less physical resource, etc) ... the real question behind this one is - will we ever develop a sufficiently mature mindset to embrace the opportunities for cultural change presented by IT. Perhaps another discussion though!
A data centre will always need power, yes - and how that power is generated is not in this scope of this discussion (albeit perhaps relevant). However, as an industry we must press, and keep pressing, to reduce the power demands ... and we need to be continually questioning our governments, companies, partners and suppliers on their environmental credentials to ensure the message is not forgotten.
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