Green IT Gets Real As The Hype Disperses

How do you rate cloud energy efficiency?

Optimis is a EU project to develop an open and independent cloud brokerage platform which customers can use to connect with cloud service providers. One of the key aspects of Optimis is that it will allow customers of cloud services to assess service providers according to a number of criteria. Alongside trust, risk, and cost, customers will also be able to assess the energy efficiency of a particular cloud service.

Developing the technology to define cloud services in these terms is as close to the cutting edge as you can get without falling off. This is especially true in the area of energy efficiency where tasks that may appear straightforward are actually anything but. For example, it’s highly likely that service providers will be running applications or platforms on virtual machines. But working out the energy efficiency of an individual workload on a virtual machine is extremely complex. In fact the technology and models to do it don’t really exist, certainly not in any organized form at the moment.

One of the challenges and opportunities of working on an EU-backed project such as Optimis is being given the latitude to experiment and push boundaries, free from the commercial imperatives you would find inside most high-tech suppliers. True, innovative organisations such as Google have their 70:20:10 approach where the developers are allotted time to work on niche or personal projects, but that isn’t the norm.

The first code release, or code drop, from Optimis is due to be made public in June, so it will be great to be able to share our work so far. The project runs for another two years, and is being funded to the tune of €7m Euros, so there is still plenty of work to do.

However, when complete, Optimis will provide a way to assess the energy efficiency of cloud computing in a very granular way. Some of that will be achieved by developing a methodology to measure the energy efficiency of a virtual or physical workload, but we’ll also use existing metrics and schemes.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has its flaws and detractors but it’s still a useful measure of data centre energy efficiency. Likewise the EU Code of Conduct for data centres, and US EPA Energy Star rating all provide a shorthand for assessing the energy efficiency of cloud service supplier – or at least the infrastructure they are using.

Projects such as Optimis show that behind the hype, technology trends such as green IT and cloud computing are having a very real impact on the IT is developed, deployed, and paid-for. Marketing plays an important role in promoting genuine innovations but it’s important that it doesn’t end up trampling over the very things it’s trying to promote. It’s fine to screen out the hype as long as you don’t ignore the real achievements in the process.

Andrew Donoghue is an analyst covering Eco-efficient IT with The 451 Group.