Climate change is the biggest global threat that we face. The volume of digital data processed is growing and so too is the need for the physical space to store it all. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) estimate that US data centers consumer 1.8 percent of electricity in that country, and that figure is set to rise. This is despite the existence of an increasing number of carbon neutral data centers available to the select few that can afford to access them.
Typically, businesses with increasing data challenges invest in new hardware, yet the average server utilization at any given data center is shockingly low. The average core monetary cost of this under-utilization is estimated at 36 billion dollars. The environmental cost is arguably greater than that – data center emissions reportedly have the same carbon footprint as the entire airline industry.
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