There has been a lot of hype and buzz about the cloud and its “as a services” for at least 10 years now. We have had thousands of write-ups about private versus public versus hybrid over and over again. The average business owner and the consumer should understand the terminology by now, so let’s concentrate more on the facts about where the cloud is hosted – environmentally.
We know that the data centre market is still growing fast, and companies ping their data in and out to the cloud pretty effortlessly nowadays. Okay, there are some restrictions, such as bandwidth, speed, CPUs, cloud architecture and location, to name a few, that businesses tend to manage either by themselves or on request from the provider. We won’t concentrate on this aspect either, but we will highlight the environmental infrastructure of data centres – particularly with cloud data centres.
Did you know that by signing a new contract with one of the traditional cloud providers you have signed for the carbonised cloud? The big names such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft, to name just the most recognizable ones, offer ridiculously cheap examples of today’s cloud trends – “blob” “cluster”, you name it. But they’re based mostly on legacy cooling architecture – or carbonised, “polluted” cloud.
Most of the traditional data centres used by cloud providers such as those mentioned above use an antiquated air-cooling method to cool their IT infrastructure. This technique requires huge amounts of power to work efficiently without temperature outages, with raised floors that help to spread the fire quickly and with an unmanageable backup UPS power station that runs on dirty diesel fuel. On top of this will likely be new gadgets such as humidifiers that have been installed to help replicate an optimal atmosphere, and more. All this hardware needs separation and placement to avoid overheating, as well as power, power and more power.