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no direct way to obtain renewable energy, this can be used to compensate
for the damage in calculation terms at least.
There is also a new favourite site, Iceland has 100% renewable energy from
geothermal energy, hydropower, and a geographical location between
Europe and North America which is ideal in terms of the length and latency
of the data lines. The country is also thinking about incentives for investors,
in order to participate in the Cloud.
What options remain for the consumer? As already mentioned, 80% of the
energy is not consumed at the datacentre, but by the customer. One of the
approaches to reducing the use of energy locally is to use Thinclients.
These alternatives to conventional PCs, also known as fat clients, are a fairly
significant factor in outsourcing to the Cloud, and their efficiency is now very
high. At some point, the result of the Cloud application needs to make its
ways to the end‐user. Whether in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, on
the ERP system, or via the mail client. We also need a local infrastructure to
be able to interact with the provider's systems. In terms of desktop systems
we are currently experiencing a small revolution. While you would typically
find clumsy towers under the desks up the middle of the last decade in the
last millennium, or even noisy desktops on desks, running the applications,
you will now tend to find more laptops and tablet PCs. The latter have
conquered the user landscape because they offer everything the PC or the
laptop never could:
A lean operating system without a noticeable boot time
Battery capacity, typically for more than one workday
However, time has not stood still at the normal office workplace either, and
this means that more and more terminal server clients are being used that
offer little to no local functionality, but are equivalent to fully fledged
desktops in combination with a server. Some of these models have a power
consumption of just five watts, which is about a tenth of that of a legacy
desktop. The wait and boot time is typically only a fraction of that for a
legacy PC, and you could probably replace 9 % of PCs in use today with thin
clients this kind.
What things look like in reality
According to an IBM survey
i
,
the average server room size in Austria is 25m².
Cooling is typically provided by non‐redundant, inefficient cooling systems,
some of which are air‐conditioning systems from the local DIY store. This
