Before I started reading "Where is the cloud?" I thought that the issues of privacy and jurisdiction were going to be the most interesting parts of the article. So, imagine my surprise when the environmental issues of cloud technology became my biggest takeaway. The most frightening thing I read was that "data centers consumed one percent of the world's electricity in 2005, and the carbon footprint of data centers will surpass that of air travel and many other raditional industries before 2020" (Jaeger, et. al p. 5).
We speak of the amazing capabilities of cloud technology, and the ability to access our information anywhere, but our information isn't really stored "in the clouds". Giant data centers, the "cloud providers" will own and maintain the "cloud cluster" of all our data. "Where actually?, you won't have a clue" ( Jaeger, et. al p. 3).
Right now, "many data centers are being built in locations with plentiful land, favorable corporate tax rates, and affordable electricity" (Jaeger, et. al p. 5). In the never ending quest to save money, cloud providers have turned their eyes to the sea, not the sky. Google has submitted a patent for water based data centers (Jaeger, et al. p. 6). What will they think of next?! Once the authors starting talking about the risk of pirates pillaging this technology, I couldn't get the image of Waterworld out of my head.
Back in 2008, McKinsey Consulting published "Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Effeciency" http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/bto/pointofview/pdf/Revolutionizing_Data_Center_Efficiency.pdf
and introduced CADE, a new metric, similar to that of the automobile industry (their metric is CAFE) which attempts to offer solutions for data center energy efficiency.
With our increased hunger for cloud computing, we will be relying on these data centers more than ever. What will become of our carbon footprint? With our heads in the clouds, will we even notice what we've done to the earth?
Energy and Location had not been in my head when I thought about cloud computing as well. Since energy could not be transported to long destination, I believe we would be able to see info center near our neighborhood, together with green energy.
ReplyDeleteYou raise some points that I hadn't considered as much, but they are extremely, extremely important. This makes me wonder if a study has been done to study what has a larger environmental impact: everyone owning their own local machine or data being hosted on the cloud with people using terminals from their home to access their computer applications.
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