Mar 06 2010
Cloud Computing Data Centres in Ireland
I read an interesting article in The Irish Times recently about Microsoft‘s view on cloud computing data centres in Ireland. The article covers comments by John Vassallo who is Microsoft’s Vice-President of EU Affairs, and it can be read online at Data centres may attract 20,000 firms.
It is a short (and slightly meaningless) article. However, one comment by John Vassallo really caught my attention:
Mr Vassallo added that Ireland was cited in a recent publication as “a beautiful place for a data centre” due to its climate.
It is difficult to interpret this comment! I am not even sure if this is serious! Perhaps the cloud analogy is being taken too far :D
March 8th, 2010 at 12:36
It’s actually a serious comment, believe it or not. Only about 50% of the electricity costs of running a data centre are in powering the servers themselves. The other 50% goes on cooling.
Operating large datacentres in a cool, temperate climate does have a definite monetary payoff, in terms of reduced energy consumption.
March 8th, 2010 at 20:15
Check out: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/for-microsoft-executive-ireland-is-a-beautiful-place-for-a-data-center/
March 13th, 2010 at 09:50
And an interesting article on the subject in general: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1737963