As somebody who works in the industry I am delighted your article did not make cloud computing sound like a panacea that will solve all earthly problems. Yes, indeed there is huge potential for energy and cost savings for businesses of all types.

Most of those come from the fact that they do not need to run large data centers running at less than full capacity. However for those who think somehow cloud computing means there will be no more heat dissipated by millions of data center servers and their hard disks spinning away, they’ll be mistaken.

In reality, the hope would be that if most data centers run at about 33% of capacity on average, and 3 of them decide to move to cloud computing provider, that can cover 100% of their needs, their would surely be energy savings.

The service provider obviously will have to over-provision to be ready for spikes in demand, and that will mean some wasted energy nonetheless.

However the hope is that they are over provisioning to the tune of 20 or 30% not 300%, so clearly significant savings can be achieved.

I’m glad you touched on this important topic and I look forward to following your blog. Thank you.

Imran Anwar –
iCloud.pk