Can Clouds Really Have A Green Lining?

I’m mildly sceptical of the idea that virtualised servers, and the private and public clouds which run on them, are inherently green.

Modern servers use less energy for a given load, and virtualised centres distribute those loads more efficiently so there is less wasted space on servers and storage. That is true.

But if Intel, Dell, HP and the rest really believe we will, overall, be be using less energy on our IT, then their business plans would call for a massive reduction in the number of servers they plan to sell in coming years – and I don’t think they, or their shareholders are actually saying that.

So just like all previous revolutions, I’m pretty sure the move to virtualisation and clouds will just be a more efficient way to do vastly more than before (and the more in question will be processing of ever greater quantities of BI, ERP, mobile browsing and all the rest of it). The total power used in data centres will, I am afraid, always go up.

No single solution

But within that gloomy picture, what of the details? Is it better to handle data in-house or use a cloud service? Is it better to work on business stuff while moving around, or stick at a desk?

I’m not sure there are good answers here – and the actual answer will differ from company to company.

For instance, your in-house server may be inefficient compared with a virtual machine at an infrastructure-as-a-service provider. But consider the flows of information: your data will use more energy getting to and from the cloud service, and that might reduce the benefit.

And for many, the time delay in getting data to and from the data centre may preclude using anything off-site,

I don’t know of any really good work on the carbon impact or otherwise of using cloud services. For instance, a report last year that said Google searches are the equivalent of boiling kettles disintegrated, when looked at closely.

Passing the buck

And there will certainly be other, more artificial, factors here – for instance, outsourcing your data can get the electrical power use off your books and onto the providers’, thereby cutting the energy budget a large organisation will have to submit to the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.

And then there’s the consideration of where the electricity comes from. Facebook has been pilloried by Greenpeace because its data centre may be very efficient (in the top rank for its PUE rating) but it uses coal-fired power.

If that really becomes an issue, Greenqloud may be onto a good thing – it’s heavily branding its cloud service as “green” because it is based in Iceland, and powered by hydroelectricity.

That doesn’t answer the questions of how carbon-neutral the cloud is overall, but at least we can say in one case, here’s a cloud that has a pretty good claim to being green.