The New York Times ran a feature article titled Power, Pollution and the Internet. The article detailed the amount of power used and the energy wasted by data centers. Data centers provide data storage and provide cloud-based services and offer colocations for business phone and internet service providers.
Here are some of the interesting highlights from the article:
Most of the power waste of data centers is blamed on the fact that data center managers and company IT representatives are not measured on their ability to conserve but the amount of uptime they produce. Experts agree that in an effort to produce five-nine uptimes (99.999%) too much energy is being wasted.