Can someone tell me what is these data centres

Ash.J.Williams

there's datacentres we need, so we can function, but we have several datacentres yet to be built that the UK, Europe and the the rest of the world need and will drain 30% of our energy.

The J Stands for Jay

They have taken the lead out of petrol and I don't feel that petrol cars are adding a great deal to the pollution of the world.

Then I'm sure you wouldn't mind being locked in a room with an idling petrol car?

Ger Roe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955843#Comment_117955843

It does indeed, and just the other day it was announced that we could be in serious trouble regarding electric energy supply, for every one of the next five years that they have forecast for.

It is not that people are against data centres, but more that we are not planning for the requirements that these (and other) developments will need. In fact,all we have are plans.... but we are not delivering the infrastructure and have fallen very short on most of the targets we either gave ourselves, or were committed to through various international agreements.

In the current circumstances the only short term fix option is to reduce demand and that will most likely be done by hiking the price charged to the easily targeted domestic consumer. It will be dressed up as a potential for saving through the smart meter roll out, (if you can use more energy at night, the increased charges will affect you less) but in the end it will simply cost us all more to use less energy.

It is only sensible to now ask the question why we are encouraging high energy use companies to locate here, when we do not have the infrastructure to support them.

BrianD3

Data centres and power consumption were covered in an unintentionally hilarious way on yesterday's Today Show. One woman had the innovative idea that we should, like, generate power naturally, like from waves and stuff.

Ian O' Doherty then came in talking about the cloud and how data isn't actually stored there but in data centres. No sh*t.

Then they were talking about how maybe we should send fewer email to save power, maybe use more pen and paper.

Markcheese

Are we all going to move to electric cars - ? Yes -but it's going to take a while - all NEW cars will have to be electric by 2030 - Most ( not all but most ) people will top up their batteries over night , when there is plenty of spare capacity -

Same with your shower - you'll probably just heat your hot water cylinder with cheap rate electricity over night ..

Heating ? Well if your home is very well insulated you shouldn't need much but yeah coal and oil are prob on the way out - gas will prob be a lot dearer but if you're using less then ok , and the big push is electric heat pumps ,-

Have eirgrid or the gov actually blamed data centres for our potential power shortages ? I've heard lots of "commentators" doing this , in fairness eirgrid have given the approval for data centres on the grid - if there's been political interference they should say !!

Ger Roe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117962447#Comment_117962447

In order to answer the future energy supply question fully, there would have to be a considerable degree of communication and cooperation between various agencies and several government departments. As a country, we have an abysmal record on that aspect - left hand mainly doesn't know, or care, what the right hand is doing. Each department looks after it's own aspect exclusively and disregards the fact that it is one of several component parts affecting a far broader issue.

riclad

Facebook has millions of users it has to store all their data videos, images, posts, on servers in a secure building and send that data all around the globe . Data centres use alot of power . It needs data centres in most country's. The cloud is just a name for servers located in a data centre that can be accessed from any device online

I've been in a about 20 data centers.

Any decent size company has their main infrastructure and servers in data centers.

Even the leading supermarkets in Ireland are in data centers.

The issue here is with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Google etc. The major players where one or two racks won't do them.

They need multiple buildings.

BraveDonut

The first 45 seconds of this video will tell you how interesting they are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdYtuMnlu1I

BraveDonut

I used to work for one of the large companies mentioned at the start of this thread. I was once told that they have paid for first dibs on ALL of the diesel stored in Dublin port should they need to run on generators in the event of a national grid failure

Clareman

If you are a company looking to do work for another company 1 of the first questions that will be asked will be "how secure will our data be and can we test the security?", if your company has it's own solution in house the other company will send someone down to check your setup, spend days testing shite and come up with loads of reasons why the data isn't secure whereas if your data is in the "cloud" your response will be "you data is hosted in XYZ" and that'll be the end of that. Most "proper" companies don't bother having a server onsite anymore, heck I used to have my own "server" at home, I don't bother anymore and just have cloud storage, it works out a lot cheaper for me to pay €100 a year for 2TB rather than having a server spinning at home 24/7 especially as hard drives fail a lot more frequently than you'd expect.