Sustainability is an interesting thing. It really means so many
things to so many people but I really like the way it is defined in
Wikipedia; "Sustainability is the capacity to endure." Clearly,
when taken in the context of the environment we are as an industry
taking steps to try to be sustainable. If you look at the executive
brief we are releasing today and the Microsoft.com story on "Microsoft's Quest for Greater Efficiency in the
Cloud", I talk about the metrics that have been introduced
recently by the Green Grid such as CUE and WUE to add to the
already globally recognized metric of PUE. These are really great
metrics to improve sustainability in our industry segment and as
you all know I am a huge supporter of these metrics. However, the
problem long term with these metrics is that they only optimize the
datacenter piece in the complete ecosystem. This is why over the
past couple years, my main focus (and the focus of my new team) has
been looking at the whole cloud ecosystem as an opportunity for
optimization. How does that change how we look at things? How can
we integrate across what have been different industry segments to
achieve greater efficiencies and an even more sustainable cloud
ecosystem than we could have ever imagined? For example, I
introduce the idea of data plants, which is the integration of
power plants and datacenters. This concept can substantially
improve efficiency by eliminating the need for transmission lines,
substations, and transformers (as well as the associated voltage
losses) that we see in today's power distribution ecosystem. With
data plants we distribute a form of energy called data in a
completely different grid called the network. Looking at it this
way, we are essentially taking another step in the evolution of
refining the energy being distributed.
- In the 1800s - coal was the primary form of energy for
industry
- In the 1900s - electricity (a processed form of coal) was the
form of energy for industry
- In the 2000s - data (a processed form of electricity) will be
the form energy for industry
The point is that if we look at data as a form of energy, how
does that change what we are doing today? When I talk about the
disappearing datacenter, what I really mean is that it will
disappear as we know it through integration and drive unprecedented
levels of efficiency gain….and this can only be done at the scale
of the cloud.
//cb
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