Guest Column: The Green Data Center: A Journey Of One Thousand Steps

It's often hard for people outside of the slightly specialized world of distributed computing and data centers to get their heads around quite how critical and complex they have become. So I find the attention the media is now lavishing upon the data center industry to be bittersweet.

"Sweet" because it certainly serves to put into perspective the dark art of data center computing. A recent article in the Economist noted that by 2010, the total number of servers in the U.S. is expected to grow to 15.8 million, located in 7,000 data centers nationwide – the biggest of which currently contain up to 80,000 servers each.