Data centers still waste energy — or do they?

If you read our report on IBM Canada’s new Barrie, Ont., data centre, you’ll know one of the important features is that it’s a so-called “green” data centre. But over the weekend a controversy errupted over whether data centres are really saving much energy.

This article from Saturday’s New York Times argues most U.S. data centres still waste energy. After a year-long examination of public records, the newspaper concludes that far from the image of energy efficience, data centres in general run round the clock whatever the demand and therefore waste much of the electricity they pull in.

 

 

(Data centre image from Shutterstock)

 

Or do they? This counter-argument in Forbes claims that the NYT piece is misleading in that it suggests the low server utilization rate in corporate data centres is the same as in so-called Intenet data centres of companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google.