I am thinking of starting a new category for Greenwashing claims.
One I just saw is Compression Could Reduce Data Center Energy Use by 95%.
U.S. business servers and data centers suck up the energy equivalent of all the electricity consumed by color televisions. The industry uses about the same amount of electricity as 5.8 million average American households. How to green such a massive sector? Start with better data compression technologies, which is already widely used in backup and secondary storage to decrease the capacity needed for these functions.
Broaden out that concept and apply compression to primary data, such as application servers, email or databases and that will radically reduce data center energy usage. Storwize Inc., a San Jose, CA tech company, has a process to reduce data center energy usage up to 95 per cent. This means on a 100 TB database, Storwize can compress that to less than 10 TB of physical disk.
Real-time data compression reduces the amount of data written to storage devices and thus reduces CPU, disk, memory and network utlilization on the storage system. It can do this through its patent-pending algorithms that allow write and read operations from any location within the file while avoiding the need to decompress the whole file.
Compressed data doesn't just save energy use, it reduces the real estate required to house the data centres, the energy needed to cool down the space and all the other trappings of physical space that adds up to a heavier footprint on the environment.
I can't believe someone would claim 95% energy savings. What if you have encrypted data (which will not compress well)?
Maybe the problem is this content was on www.ecogeek.org, and the company is creating traffic to drive its ad revenue.
