CTO: Is the cloud greener?

cloud technology pub discussions:#2 Is The Cloud Greener

Is migrating to the cloud the ecologicalchoice?

Studies and Stats

Greenpeace: a power hungry data centre can consume up to 622.6 billion

kilowatts per hour.

With data centres estimated in 2020 to be getting through more kilowatts hours of

electricity combined than the current joint consumption of France, Germany, Canada

and Brazil.

On the other hand

WSP Environmental: estimates that a 100 person SME using the cloud could reduce

energy consumption and emissions by 90%...

…and by 2020 all US business combined using the cloud can make annual reductions

equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil.

What are the factors?

With the market for green data centres to grow from $17.1Bn in 2012 to $45.4Bn in

2016, what are the green factors?

The energy source

The ecological data centre uses

ecological power sources.

The equipment and devices

Computer energy efficiency appears to be doubling every 18 months. Data centres

which maintain good recycling and replacement cycles for servers, storage and

network equipment are the most power efficient.

Data centre setup

Hardware location: grouping hardware with common environmental requirements

together reduces power needs.

Virtualization: run multiple independent

virtual systems on a single computer. Fewer server means reduced power and reduced

cooling requirements.

Air management reduces power

requirements: minimise the bypassing of

cooling air from the rack intakes; maximiserecirculation of heat exhausts back into rack

intakes.

Setup analysis

Pike Research assessed 5 setups from ‘on

premise’ without virtualisation to good and bad practise public and private cloud setups.

On premise poor setup with no virtualisation

can use 46kg of CO2 per year.

Public cloud setup following best green

practices can use 2kg of CO2 per year.

However, data storage from a poor powered

and inefficiently run public cloud can be less green than a well setup and powered on

premise system.

For a greener cloud

Energy consumption from our expanding

data centre industry must be well managed,with energy efficiency and carbon usage

made a priority.

And, it is up to businesses interested in

their environmental impact to ask for transparency on energy efficiency and carbon

usage from their data centres.

Not even touched on…

… the hidden green benefits from the

socioeconomic impacts of cloud computing and ecommerce.

What do you think? Contact CTO and let us know.

[email protected]

tel: 0044 (0)20 3478 9049