A new survey from the Uptime Institute suggests fatigue is setting in when it comes to making data centres greener, and it may be partly due to overachievers like Google and Microsoft. In the Institute's latest survey of data centre operators, only 50% of respondents in North America said they considered energy efficiency to be very important to their companies. That was down from 52% last year and 58% in 2011, and is despite a constant drumbeat of encouragement to reduce energy costs and cut carbon emissions.

Companies want to pay US$600 or more per sq ft to locate their gear close to high-priority data centres in New Jersey that host the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, a rate four times the cost of square footage across the river in Manhattan, according to the New York Times. The story shows that, like in all real estate, finding a home for your servers is all about location, location, location. In this case, proximity to data. There are benefits to locating auxiliary data and services in close proximity to big repositories of financial data.