HP's purchase of EDS is all over the news with a bunch of an analysis on how it better prepares HP Services to compete against IBM services. IBM is the top go to market services company in Green Data Centers initiatives.
I even found a blog post at IT Business Edge on Green Data Centrers, HP hopes interest in green services will help it take on big blue.
It sure sounded ambitious when in March HP unveiled a bundle of hardware, software and services that it said would help transform the data center into a more efficient and flexible entity.
Turns out that was only the tip of the ambition iceberg for HP. Perhaps spurred by recent news of Google’s and IBM’s intent to partner on a cloud computing initiative, HP announced that it is purchasing EDS, a company that can help it advance even further into the growing data center outsourcing business, for $13.9 billion.
Companies’ interest in offloading their data centers to third parties is increasing, driven at least partly by their desire to run “greener” businesses. Data centers are notorious energy hogs. Companies can shave up to 40 percent off their energy costs by outsourcing IT and data center functions, according to IDC.
But, then I found this post on an EDS blog, Green Data Centres - It's Easy, Follow the Sun
If you are an advocate of solar energy, then one of the biggest debates that you are likely to get into is around the question of Grid Parity. If you carry out some simple sums, then in terms of the cost to build a new power plant, we are already there. The supporting evidence is the number of new base load solar plants that are springing up, like this one in Arizona. But the phrase that has captured my interest is that of a Solar Continent. Australia is, like much of the US, very well positioned to capture a great deal of energy from the sun. With the falling prices of PhotoVoltaic (PV) panels, it is very likely that in the next ten to twenty years much of the western world will be powered with some form of distributed energy (DE). So how does this affect our data centres?
The problem our data centres have is that they are unable to tap this energy early enough to shed the large running costs now being experienced. Many of the world's data centres are not on a path to long term reliability or sustainability. With the complex business interactions now necessary to complete transactions, the availability of reliable energy is paramount. Consequently, the state of data centres is now seen by industry observers as being parlous; however, as outlined in this Synnovation article, The Future Looks Green, the path to sustainability is not insurmountable.
The blog continues, and supports the idea of following the sun to use solar energy.
Hopefully this is not representative of other thinking in EDS, because this will increase the costs of a data center dramatically vs. a following the moon strategy when you could use off peak power.