While much of the tech world reacted to the death of Steve Jobs, the facility-dominated audience at DatacenterDynamics seemed hardly to notice, even though Jobs changed IT in a way that will ripple through the data center industry for years to come.
Early on a June morning, the temperature hovers at 52 degrees in the high deserts of Central Oregon. Even though the daytime highs can soar to 104 degrees in summer months, the cold nights are key to the sustainable cooling system in the Vault—one of the only co-location data centers in the nation that is dedicated to sustainable energy use and has Tier III Constructed Facility certification.
Over the course of the past decade, organizations have begun to rely significantly more on information technology (IT) systems to support business-critical applications. Organizations such as banks, telecommunications companies, internet service providers, and cloud/co-location facilities rely heavily on the availability of their data centers as many of their customers are paying a premium for access to a variety of IT applications.
Jonathon G. Koomey’s recently released and highly publicized report, “Growth in Data Center Electricity Use: 2005 to 2010” is nothing like other reports that have warned that power consumption in data centers is out of control. In the past five years, we have seen article after article extrapolating from an earlier Koomey publication and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Report to Congress, suggesting that total U.S. data center energy consumption is now at 3 to 5 percent or more of total U.S. use.