Follow the sun, not Sarbanes-Oxley

With no shortage of competing advice, it's good to see the Green Grid gain members. As an industry consortium devoted to efficient data centre computing, it promises to become a useful clearing-house for ideas and projects that can apply across the industry. Yet although its intentions are laudable, its scope needs to be broader.

Take the problems uncovered by a data-processing model called 'follow the sun'. Humans need to rest; machines do not. That means that electricity and computing resources have to be designed to cope with high demands during the day but spend a lot of their time at night idling, leading to inefficiencies. With fast networking and grid technology, a global company can move sustained processing tasks to dark-side servers, or provide supplemental processing at peak times to sunlit areas. That makes best use of cheap off-peak electricity and reduces the need to over-provision data centres.

The natural extension of this idea, and one that the grid has always promised, is one where non-global companies can buy into this scheme — or, indeed, offer services on the grid themselves. The places with the lowest cost-per-watt will be preferable, and market forces will work towards environmental good sense. The technical issues, although significant, are tractable. The real problems lie elsewhere.

One bank that tried an experimental follow-the-sun processing model across Asia, Europe and the US reported that the proof of principle worked — but because of international financial and compliance regulations, was impossible to justify. Sarbanes-Oxley rules led to complex inter-company billing and cross-border taxation, and data privacy and security rules were also hard to follow.

While these regulations have evolved as a result of genuine and significant problems, they were not composed with energy issues in mind. Indeed, the notion that accountancy rules and data-protection law can have an impact on the environment seems positively surreal. Yet they can: an area deserving innovation and with great long-term promise is being shut down at birth.

The Green Grid is the ideal starting point for consideration of these complex problems where technology, law and potential meet. Keeping the power down in data centres is important; making sure we don't paint ourselves into a corner for the future is even more so. We look forward to the consortium producing not just solid advice for today, but road plans and forward thinking for the years ahead.