Holi

A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the
information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleekefficiency and environmental friendliness. This is the mundane face of digital information — player statistics flowing into servers thatcalculate fantasy points andleague rankings, snapshots from nearly forgotten vacations keptforever in storage devices. It is only when the repetitions of those and similar transactionsareadded up that they start to become impressive. Jeremy Burton, an expert in data storage, said that when he worked at a computer technology company 10 years ago,the most data-intensive customer he dealt with had about 50,000 gigabytes in its entire database. Engineers at Viridity Software, a start-up that helped companiesmanage energy resources,were not surprised by what they discovered on the floor of a sprawling data center nearAtlanta. “There are new technologies andimprovements,” Mr. Crosby said, “but it still all runs on a power cord.” The servers are contained in two Amazon data centers run out of three buildings shaped likebulky warehouses with green, corrugated sides. Air ducts big enough to accommodate industrial cooling systems sprout along the rooftops; huge diesel generatorssit in rows around the outside. The violations came in addition to a series of lesser infractions at one of Amazon’s data centers in Ashburn, Va., in 2009, forwhich the company paid $3,496, according to the department’s records. In this days its necessary to have a really good software, electricity and equipment.