Jeff Atwood has posted an inter­est­ing arti­cle on how these days for com­pa­nies like Google that run large server dat­a­cen­ters, the cost of hard­ware is neg­li­gi­ble. The real con­cern, is power consumption.

• When Hard­ware is Free, Power is Expen­sive

I’m often inter­ested in hear­ing the strate­gies that Google is taking in terms of these types of things. In the future, energy con­cerns will only become more impor­tant. As large as Google is, they’re in a good posi­tion to take the lead in terms of cre­at­ing a some­what sus­tain­able (or at least not entirely waste­ful) com­puter enterprise.