Damn the laws of thermodynamics! There are power losses all over the data centre which contribute to poor energy utilisation. These losses present themselves as heat. If it wasn’t for energy losses we would have perpetual motion data centres. 

I happened to attend a debate presented by intelligence² titled Governments should not censor the internet. It was about governments’ role in censoring the internet (topical to us in Australia) to protect the ‘vunerable’ from content that is deemed too explicit or anti-social.

So, are data centres part of the problem, and do they have a part to play in ensuring the likes of you and I are kept safe from information that could corrupt us?

Air.  It's a wonderful thing. Little did 18th century researchers like Joseph Priestly (1733–1804) and Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743–1794), who investigated the properties of air, know it would become a cooling medium for information technology (IT) in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The data centre pod has multiple constructs and the morphology varies. This is borne out by how data centre vendors have engineered their versions of a pod to address the data centre industry.  The pod market reminds me of the expression on a tee-shirt I was given from someone who had returned from a Southeast Asian holiday: ‘same, same, but different’.

Kyoto, Copenhagen, climate change, global warming, greenhouse gases, emissions trading scheme, carbon tax, carbon capture and sequestration, carbon offset, sustainability, renewable energy sources, data centres.  Data centres?!  Hang on.  Back up.  How do data centres fit in that list?

Every year, the clothing industry attempts to re-invent itself as fashionistas boldly declare that some colour is the new black.  In the case of the data centre industry, green is the new black.  But this isn’t a fad or even re-invention, it’s r-evolution.

You’ve probably heard the term ‘follow the sun’.  Effectively, it is saying that as one set of staff are finishing for the day as the sun goes down in their part of the world, another set of staff, in a totally different location and time zone, are commencing their day.  It’s used as a way to describe how, for example, call centres, help desks and financial dealing rooms can provide continuous service across a 24-hour day without having to maintain a shift roster of many people in one location.  That all seems to make sense.

Real-estate agents constantly chant the mantra ‘location, location, location’.  Well, the data centre industry’s mantra is fast becoming ‘energy, energy, energy’.
 

Looking at the criteria that constitutes the four data centre tiers specified in TIA 942, there’s one that sets me thinking: the proximity of the data centre to major capital city airports (not the secondary light-aircraft airports).  It’s ok for a tier 1 or 2 data centre, yet, for some reason, tier 3 and 4 data centres need to look elsewhere.