High-performance data centers have long been seen as power hungry due, and increases in the off-label use of GPUs has only made them more so. That’s a major issue in the face of new climate regulations, but it’s one that computer scientists may have been able to fix. A number of data centers that serve customers in the web publishing field now adhere to LEED guidelines, which is something that would have been seen as impossible just a few years ago.
Traditionally, any green energy data center was likely to be underpowered. While web publishing isn’t an extremely demanding field, it’s still one that takes a great deal of energy to run. By leveraging alternative sources of power, such as wind and solar, the operators of these data centers have been able to dramatically reduce their carbon footprints. Virutalization has helped to drop the amount of power they need to operate to begin with, though storage has proved to be a more resilient problem for those who operate green energy data center resources.
New storage technologies, such as those based on persistent flash chips, don’t use much power when they’re not being written to. While it can be hard to outfit an entire data center with SSDs, starting small with those focused on a simple market segment like the web publishing industry makes it easier to gain traction. Though it might take some time before these kinds of innovations make an impact elsewhere, they’re promising to fundamentally change the way the industry does business.
