Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 133

the electricity lowing for fear that service will not be available when it
is needed. Customers leasing facilities do not want to hear about down
time and are not reluctant to ind another cloud provider if 24/7 service
is not provided. So engineers working for cloud companies labor in fear
of losing their jobs if they are caught with their servers down. Better to
power unused servers than to face an angry customer. According to one
executive at a utility irm, “It's a nervousness in the I.T. community that
something isn't going to be available when they need it” (ibid.). There
is practically no incentive to save energy and every incentive to keep the
system going. As a senior industry executive told the Times , “This is an
industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the irst to say mea culpa. If
we were a manufacturing industry, we'd be out of business straightaway”
(ibid.). The term dirty is appropriate in more than one sense.
Another not-so-little secret is the reliance on very un-cloud-like backup
systems to guarantee against an electrical power failure. These include
diesel generators like those described in the case of Microsoft's data center
in central Washington. Data centers throughout Silicon Valley have been
cited on the state of California's Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory for
diesel air pollution. Since many jurisdictions lack such a tracking mecha-
nism, they cannot monitor the effects of diesel use and so must suffer the
effects of toxins and carcinogens or try their luck with legal action, as did
the citizens of Quincy. Diesel generators are not enough for an industry
determined to provide instant service, on demand, any time. These also
tend to be backed up by thousands of lead-acid batteries of the type used
in trucks and cars and by enormous lywheels whose spinning generates
more backup power. A staffer at an institute that studies electrical power
usage is not impressed: “It's a waste. It's too many insurance policies”
(ibid.). Of course, data-center managers under intense pressure to deliver
all the time would disagree. Microsoft is not the only company to be
penalized for violating environmental regulations. In October 2010,
Amazon was issued a ine of slightly over $500,000 by the state of Vir-
ginia for building, installing, and continuously running diesel generators
without obtaining the necessary permits to do so. After appeals, the ines
were cut to about half that amount, but four inspections and a total of
twenty-four violations ranked “high” do not make for a record to boast
about, especially for a company claiming leadership in cloud computing
(Barton 2012).