Green Computing and Virtualization
While contemplating about the importance of virtualization in achieving green computing standards especially in organizations hosting data centers, I came across an interesting article here on how energy emissions from data centers can be used to warm homes in Scandinavian countries.
The article mentions that in a typical data center only 40-45% of the energy is used in actual computing while the remaining is used in powering agents to cool these servers. Besides, data centers run by a search giant already seem to be using around 1% of the word's energy and their demands seem to be rising fast every year.
This is interesting information in the context of the fact that the world has finally woken up to the need to put their heads together to resolve issues related to global warming at the UN Climate Summit at Copenhagen, Denmark.
There is a general feeling that the summit highlights the importance that the world is conscious that technological advancements have contributed to increased emissions and the need of the hour is to bring in another set of eco-friendly technology advancements. Which means 'Virtualization' is a word that is going to be part of every day conversation in enterprises as the advantages of 'virtualizing' the data center are well known. As a by-product, the focus is also going to be on development of tools that are going to make the process of virtualizing the infrastructure and managing it much easier.
