Greenpeace gave Apple poor grades in its report on the environmental impact of cloud computing, but it's not clear if it was being entirely fair.

You can view the report (pdf) yourself along with this video, but one thing is clear, Greenpeace paints an ugly picture of Apple’s energy choices claiming that by seating the North Carolina site in such close proximity to a coal burning plant, it was showing its lack of commitment to clean energy.

Apple’s response, according a story on Wired, was that Greenpeace got its facts wrong and that Apple will draw 60 percent of its power from renewable energy when the plant’s construction is complete.

Quoting the Wired article, “When the Maiden complex is completed, it will have biogas fuel-cell plant and a massive solar array that will collectively generate 12 megawatts of energy, or 60 percent of the data center’s requirements.”

It added that the new data center under construction in Prineville, Oregon will generate 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.

Greenpeace was also critical of Apple’s transparency on the matter giving it a letter grade of F on transparency, but when was the last time Apple was transparent about anything it does? And that could be part of the problem.

Since Apple is so closed about how it operates its business, it’s hard to separate truth from fiction in cases like this, but Data Center Knowledge did try to get to the bottom of the numbers, which seem wildly skewed based on Apple’s claims. It appears according to the Data Center Knowledge piece that Greenpeace might have made some incorrect assumptions (although again it’s hard to parse who’s right and wrong here) — but the article is highly critical of Greenpeace’s methodology saying:

“An obvious gap in that logic is that it doesn’t account for Apple’s investment in the solar array and fuel cell technology being built to support the iDataCenter – costs that are atypical for data center construction and not included in comparative metrics,” the article stated.

Greenpeace it turns out used the overall cost of the data center ($1 billion) in its formula to determine Apple’s energy requirements, but it doesn’t appear to have factored in the cost of building those renewable energy sources as part of its figures. If that is indeed the case, Greenpeace is penalizing Apple unfairly.

I will state that I’m definitely not a numbers guy, but as an Apple products user, and someone who has begun using iCloud, I am concerned about how Apple will generate energy at its various data centers — and the overall impact on the environment that is likely to have.

A few years ago I wrote an article for EContent about efforts by publishers to reduce their environmental impact. I went into the article with the assumption that by not printing, it was obviously going to be more environmentally friendly when you don’t have to cut trees, run printing presses, and distribute the print matter; but what I learned was it depended a great deal on the proximity of the data center to its primary energy source. If that data center was run primarily on coal (as Greenpeace claims Apple’s is), then it might not be greener after all.

That’s why it’s so important to get these numbers right. If Apple is burning coal, with its cash stash, it can clearly afford to be greener, but if Greenpeace has its numbers wrong, then it’s doing Apple a great disservice. The trouble is it’s hard to figure out what’s right here.

Photo by zoetnet on Flickr. Used Under Creative Commons License.

Apple made its grand entrance into cloud storage today with

Sounds pretty good from a consumer perspective, but what impact will it have on existing cloud storage vendors?

If you believe the New York Times Bits Blog, it spells the end for several small online storage vendors, as well as a slew of other small companies supplanted by the iOS 5 update.

While it’s true that in some respects, the 10,000 pound gorilla just got into the cloud, does it really mean Dropbox is doomed or Box.net just got measured for…well a pine box? Should these companies and countless others be cowering in a corner begging for a few more venture capital dollars and a prayer? I don’t think so.

When a company like Apple gets into free cloud storage, these companies should definitely take notice, but ultimately, I think Apple just did many of the established cloud storage and collaboration companies a big favor by putting the idea of cloud storage firmly in the mainstream. That could help at least some of these companies, although it probably depends on the model.

Aaron Levie, CEO at Box.net immediately upon the iCloud announcement, took to his company blog to assure everyone (including possibly himself) that what Apple was offering was all well and good, but it was different from what Box was offering.

Box has been selling itself as enterprise content storage and collaboration company for some time. Sure, some of its customers are consumers and small businesses, but it understands to be a highly successful company, it needs paying enterprise customers and the cash flow they bring.

As Levie wrote about iCloud, “iCloud may be incredibly powerful in a context where you are solely interacting with your own information, but does little for you when you want to easily extend content to others.” And he’s right, the difference between what Box offers and iCloud offers is that Box provides a way not only to store and access files, but share and collaborate on those files — and that’s a big difference.

In fact, if iCloud works as advertised and doesn’t head down the bumpy road of MobileMe, it should provide consumers with a terrific avenue to backup and access to their content anywhere, any time on any device. The applications Jobs described today at the WWDC finally closes that cloud-mobile loop I wrote about recently in this space, but that it will muscle out all existing vendors is not a given.

As Levie points out, iCloud is not really an enterprise class system (at least not yet) and it’s not really designed to be either, but Box.net works in a freemium model. It needs the free customers to act as seed users for the rest of the enterprise. If iCloud could hurt Box, it would be because individuals were opting for iCloud instead of Box.

But that should just push Box, Dropbox and others to try harder, to offer more than iCloud. If Apple offers 5 GB of free storage, maybe these companies should offer 10 GB, and they need to strive to make their services as business friendly as they possibly can.

Apple might have just elbowed its way onto the playing field, but it didn’t necessarily wipe out all of the players already there just yet. Only time will tell, however, if Apple just expanded the pie or inhaled it. The final answer probably depends on the player and how they react to the challenge and opportunity Apple brings to this space.

Photo by Marshall Astor – Food Pornographer on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License. ]]> http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/mobile-cloud-view/is-icloud-an-ending-or-beginning-for-cloud-storage-vendors/feed/ 0