Charlie Stross@cstross@wandering.shop
This is, to put it mildly, utter bullshit.
You can store a decade of email for a million people—call it 10-20Gb each—in a 10-20Tb NAS box that costs about £2000 and sucks less electricity than a laptop.
The environment agency are gaslighting us. One wonders who put them up to it?
https://social.lol/@robb/115016579150112511
Mythic Beasts@beasts@social.mythic-beasts.com
@cstross@wandering.shop to put some numbers on it, one of our hosting VMs has ~1200 mailboxes using 1.5TB of SSD. Accounting for the CPU + RAM to allow the mail to be usable and searchable, you can get ~20 such servers on our standard 1U VM host, that uses ~250W. Approx 24k mailboxes on a server. A standard DC with adiabatic cooling would evaporate at most (likely much less) than 3500l of water per server per year or 145ml per account. We're in Telehouse South which uses 40x less water ~ 3ml/mailbox/year.