This week’s roundup of tidbits from around the Web touches on a few of those aforementioned changes: in what IT is investing in, in the data center development cycle and in mobile strategies.  Still, there are some things that it seems will never change: A floppy disk means “save,” kids. Why? Because we said so.

More proof that your mobile strategy touches pretty much everything you do, and underlining the importance of the CIO’s relationship with the chief marketing officer and the business: Thanks to social media and mobility demands, investment in CRM (customer relationship management) software has jumped from No. 18 to No. 8 in a Gartner Inc. survey of CIO and CEO priorities.

Still not convinced of the importance of a mobile strategy? Even within the slow-grinding gears of government, the call for “mobile first” is gaining traction.

Blogger Greg Ness opines on how the commoditization of network hardware could drive a new data center development cycle.

So, maybe she doesn’t always give you the best directions or particularly accurate weather forecasts. Did you ever think maybe Siri is just meant for a higher calling? Forget the neoprene case — get this lady a lab coat.

It hadn’t occurred to us until we saw this post that, for some computer users, the floppy-disk icon is not “the floppy-disk icon” — it’s “that thing you click on” to save stuff. It says something very interesting about the evolution of culture and language, yes, but mostly it just makes us feel old.

But look behind the curtain, and these Wizards of Oz have a dirty little secret: To a staggering degree, they’re still buying electricity generated by coal-burning power plants.

“The IT industry’s failure to disclose basic information on its rapidly growing energy footprint has hidden a continued reliance on 19th-century dirty coal power to power its 21st-century infrastructure,” said Gary Cook, an IT policy analyst at Greenpeace International, an Amsterdam-based organization that uses nonviolent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems.

Apple, Facebook and IBM have the biggest appetites for coal-generated electricity, consuming enough to supply more than half of their power needs, according to a new report from Greenpeace titled, “How Dirty is Your Data?”.

The report analyzes publicly available information to estimate the amount of clean and dirty energy being driven by investment decisions and energy choices by the major Internet brands. Finding those numbers from within the companies proved nearly impossible, according to Cook.

“Despite the fact that data centers … currently consume 1.5% to 2% of all global electricity and are growing at a rate of 12% per year, companies in the sector as a whole do not release information on their energy use and its associated global warming emissions,” Cook wrote.

U.S. data center construction is clustering in places like North Carolina and the Midwest, where cheap, coal-powered electricity is abundant. When opened, the Apple iData Center in North Carolina, for example, will consume an estimated 100 megawatts — equivalent to the electricity needed to power about 80,000 U.S. homes, or a quarter-million European Union ones. Apple has not yet announced how the data center will be powered.

Greenpeace’s estimates of coal intensity put IBM, HP and Twitter just behind Apple and Facebook: Apple at 54.5%, Facebook at 53.2%, IBM at 51.6%, HP at 49.4% and Twitter at 42.5%. Google’s coal intensity is ranked at 34.7%, Microsoft’s at 34.1%, Amazon’s at 28.5% and Yahoo’s at 18.3%.

Recognizing that such IT giants could be the group that leads the world to renewable energy — or, conversely, hastens the adverse effects of global warming — Greenpeace this month issued an Earth Day challenge to Facebook, calling upon the company to “unfriend coal.”

Alas, the deadline came and went with no such action, despite a blizzard of posts from 700,000 Greenpeace supporters who set a Guinness World Record for the most comments on a Facebook post in 24 hours.

Google, at least, is getting the message when it comes to new data center construction. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced last week that it would purchase power for the next 20 years from a wind farm to be built in Oklahoma; this follows a similar agreement last year to buy power from a wind farm in Ohio. Google plans to sell surplus energy from the farms to the local electrical grid, thereby ensuring that more renewable energy enters the market as part of Google’s goal of operating on a carbon-neutral footprint.

Coal-burning power plants emit harmful chemicals that are warming the Earth’s atmosphere to life-threatening levels. Nuclear power, long proposed as the safe alternative, is explosive under certain circumstances, as we’ve seen at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant. Moreover, it’s extremely difficult to safely store spent fuel rods.

Wind, solar and geothermal power projects are coming along, but not as fast as the rate of data, which is forcing huge cloud providers to choose power sources during data center construction that appear to be less costly. Yet these business practices could be costly for environmental health, which affects us all.

People can wax poetic about the cloud, but the services flying over the Web touch down on a piece of physical equipment somewhere. Consider Digital Realty Trust, a provider of data centers (move-in or custom) with more than 15 million square feet of space in 70 locations worldwide. Its data center facility in Chicago is the city’s second-largest consumer of power, behind O’Hare International Airport.

What’s scary is the prospect of a bomb being able to wipe out a mega data center and all the information in it. Or a hack. Granted, these data center behemoths are paired — mirrored to a secondary site that’s close enough to avoid latency, depending on the application and connectivity — so that if a disaster occurred at one site, the company could recover data from the other. Still, that’s a far cry from the distributed nature of the Internet, which was designed with ubiquitous connectivity so that no single (or multiple) node failure could disrupt operations. Of course, high-quality connectivity is still very expensive, so a distributed network of bandwidth-hungry mega data centers may not be the best way to go.

Physical security is just one issue; another concern is the threat of taxes that may be imposed after a mega data center is complete. When Washington state ruled last year that data centers were no longer covered by a sales tax break for manufacturers and imposed a 7.9% tax on new construction, Microsoft migrated its Windows Azure cloud computing infrastructure from its data center in Quincy, Wash., to its 475,000-sqare-foot facility in San Antonio before opening a 700,000-square-foot mega data center in Chicago.
Google is thinking of moving out of North Carolina for similar reasons, according to Mike Manos, Microsoft’s former director of data center services, who is now senior vice president of Digital Realty Trust. In his blog, Loose Bolts, Manos writes, “While most people can guess the need for adequate power and communications infrastructure, many are surprised that tax and regulation play such a significant role in even the initial siting of a facility.”

And when other parts of the country — or world — begin to offer tax incentives for building mega data centers in their backyards, being able to move workloads from one data center to another would make good economic sense. However, this requires a software layer that Google and others are still working on. “Something this cool is powerful,” Manos writes. “Something this cool will never escape the watchful eyes of the world governments.”

Reading Manos’ post, I thought of the PODs (point of distribution data centers) being marketed by the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard — virtual shipping containers redone with all the CPU power, network and cabling, water, and air cooling within. I imagined them stacked on barges, anchored in the world’s cheapest ports. But Manos had already thought of that — “Whether boats, containers or spaceships, all of these solutions require large or large-ish capital solutions. Solve the problem in software once, then you solve it forever.”

Let us know what you think about this post; email Laura Smith, Features Writer.