Going Green? The Cloud can help...

In light of the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this week, and the agreement "to set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius" I thought it would be fitting to do a quick post on the energy-saving benefits of cloud computing ... whether you are doing it to save the polar bears or to save some cash, these benefits should be recognized and considered by many organizations.

Do a Google search for cloud computing energy saving and you get about 195,000 results. This does not come as a surprise, because as one of the results states, cloud computing is "an inherently energy-efficient technology." No shock here: the amount of computing power that most organizations have is well beyond what is actually being used by their employees ... and as Moore's Law indicates, this computing power will double every two years. Many of the servers in your organization's server racks are not doing anything terribly complex: handling DNS lookups, processing email, filtering traffic, and storing data. Most organizations have a separate server for each function and may have redundant / fail-over servers as well.

This website calculates the electricity cost of running a desktop computer to be $405/year (330 Watt power supply and $0.14/kWh). A Dell PowerEdge 2970 has a 750 Watt power supply with an option for a redundant power supply for fail-over. Running this server has an electricity cost of $907/year per power supply. HowStuffWorks details how much electricity coal generates (roughly 2,460 kWh/ton). Running the example server with one power supply for a year uses 6,480 kWh, requiring 2.6 tons of coal.

Cloud computing companies often lease space in data-centers, which charge a premium for power, cooling, and rack-space (see Datacenter energy costs outpacing hardware prices). In order for companies that offer services in the cloud to remain competitive, they must be efficient with their computing power: consolidation, virtualization, efficient software, "smart" power management, etc. So adopting cloud computing is a good thing: it saves electricity/money/coal/pollution/polar bears/planet and funds the innovation of efficient computing.