Another mind-numbing meeting last night with a cloud company.  Oddly, one of the longer discussions we had dealt with the social and economic benefits of cloud computing.

The average IT installation for even small companies requires quite a bit of dedicated IT facility/room space for housing servers, uninterruptable power supplies, switches, routers, and other network support equipment.  In addition to the value of space consumed by storage systems and applications servers, there is normally a fairly high cost associated with electricity and cooling needed to keep the equipment operating.

Most corporate IT equipment runs at a very low level of efficiency.  This means that, for example, servers are designed for peak traffic and processing requirements, which may only occur once a day or even once a month.  The rest of the time those servers are running at between 5~10% of their actual processing capacity.