…is Sun Microsystems
“Why can’t we have 15 huge data centers around the world covered in solar panels and when the sun’s out go completely off the grid? We could virtualize our computing tasks and move them in real time around the world to wherever energy is cheapest.”
Their vision will be the future of computing not just because it’s way cool but because businesses will have to do things that way.
Their UltraSPARC server processors are already the most energy-efficient on the market. They say it’s good business as well as eco-friendly to save power, because the future will demand that companies do so.
Douglas cites a study by Gartner that found that by 2015 the energy cost of running computers will be greater than the cost of acquiring them. He says it’s already happened in high-cost cities like Tokyo, “and in New York it’s probably four or five years away.”
At big companies now, 20% of energy cost comes from information technology. Sun clearly gets it. Other companies clearly don’t.
Corporations have been operating this way with labor costs for decades: when Sri Lanka gets too expensive, move the operation to Indonesia… It places pressure on governments to keep their wages down (i.e. to ensure poverty). If shifting based on energy costs became widespread, that would theoretically put pressure on local governments to have cheap energy available… I wonder how that would affect the source of said energy?