By Nathan Anthony
Cloud computing isn’t new, but it seems poised for a leap forward. Those who use any of the popular online email services—Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc—have been using cloud computing for years, whether they realized it or not. Their emails are stored remotely on servers, and they access their files through the web. The servers—specialized computers linked together over a network—are stored in data centers—warehouse-like buildings that store and power all of the computing equipment. The significance of Amazon’s Cloud Player or Apple’s iCloud, then, is not the technology, but the sheer amount of data that will soon make itself permanently at home in data centers across the country. Email files are small compared to entire music libraries.
But what is the impact of all of that “free” computing? How much power does it take to load everyone’s information on a network, ready to be retrieved on a whim? Or more importantly, why should we care?
David Crocker has an answer to the last of those questions. David, Lia’s father and boss, is the CEO of Steel Orca, the company that thinks its plot of grass in the middle of a former U.S. Steel site is going to be the next big thing in the industry. The Steel Orca Bucks County Data Center, with plans for construction this fall, will run on 100 percent alternative energy sources and arguably be the world’s “greenest” data center. Why build it? “When people talk about environmental damage, they never talk about computing,” Crocker told me. “Well, computing clouds can cause acid rain too.” READ MORE >>
via americancity.org
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