commentaries

Many companies no longer have nearly so much "excess" server capacity as they did in the past by using server virtualization.

All those progressives clamoring exclusively for renewable energy should consider this when plugging in their phones, PDA's, MP3 players, guitars, etc. Perhaps these products should be restricted to some form of use so as to decrease the demand for energy.

Written by a second year doctoral candidate at the School of Engineering... maybe they should concentrate more on Engineering and less on politics.-- We could start with GPS systems-my 15 year old GPS runs about 30hrs on 2 AA batteries. The only power draw that is required for the GPS system is the power used by the satellites that broadcast the signals. Receiver power is minimal, and for the GPS to operate no computing power or server is needed. If some systems are designed that way it is to sell additional 'features' and has nothing to do with the GPS requirements themselves. --Then reading the comments on companies that run server farms you would think that they don't care how much electricity they use even though the big drive is to become more efficient and reduce operating costs. --Finally this is wrapped up in a nice global warming package. I wouldn't have even bothered to notice all of this were it not for the 'second year doctoral candidate' at an Engineering school.

It's all relative. If people are posting pictures to an internet site, rather than distributing physical photos, how much energy is saved (and how does that compare to the energy used keeping that picture stored on the internet)? I'll bet the internet option uses much less energy.

Stand up for your beliefs!!! All you greenies stop using the internet.....{it wastes energy}...more badwidth for the rest of us!

(about the author): "Ming Xu is a second-year doctoral candidate at the School of Engineering of Brown University. This article was written for the Providence Journal." ---- Would someone please clue Mr. Xu into SSD's, SpeedStep technology, SoC's, writing an extremely simple program that would move popular data to the correct servers and the old-archival stuff to the back of the line? This sounds like something Al Gore could have wrote, not a trained engineer. I expect much more such as a radical server/machine redesign from our doctoral candidates. Or, welcome to your upcoming third year.

Tweet summary: the cloud is not soft and fuzzy, its a hot room full of servers.

2% is 1 gigaton. our total emissions is 50 gigatons. al gore would be proud

"That's about one gigaton (one billion metric tons) of carbon-dioxide emissions, a significant rise from less than five years ago, when consumption was at 1.5 percent." Since the plant life on our precious planet breathes in carbon dioxide and breaths out oxygen, I'd say this could be a good thing. The optimal environment for the continued health of all plants and animals on earth would be achieved with slightly higher levels of carbon dioxide and a temperature increase of about 1.5 degrees. We've been there many times before (mostly before humans [or computer servers] even existed) and we’ll be there again. This is all just silly talk back by a not so silly big brother, big government political agenda.

Some services like Gmail are a real problem. A lot of users never delete anything in their Gmail account because they have 10 GB of storage. In the old days of 200MB of email storage users had to delete email to stay under quota. How many Terabytes or Petabytes of old email that no one will ever look at again is Google or other services storing?