Cloud Computing: UK Power Cuts: What About Your Data Centre?

A report published today by OFGEM, the UK’s energy regulator makes bleak reading for the future of electricity supply in this country.  The BBC discusses it here.

The report highlights £200bn of under-investment and the risk of power cuts over the next decade.  It’s a damning statement on the deregulation of the power industry but should be ringing alarm bells for anyone concerned with managing their data centre.  The affects could be:

• Price Rises – consumer prices could double, therefore commercial rates will be affected too.
• Backouts – there may be periods of electricity blackouts if supplies aren’t available.
• Nationalisation – the government may have to take back control of the industry.

For the UK at least, electricity consumption in data centres is going to become more critical and the efficiencies of using virtualisation even more important.  In addition, this potentially poises Cloud Computing to gain more acceptance as workload is shifted between resliency domains in different power supply juristictions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean “public” clouds but also private clouds within organisations large enough to have multiple computing centres.

The key part will be getting the application developers for those companies to change their approach and think how applications and data can be managed in a truly distributed environment.  That’s when clouds will have their day…

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