Will the cloud deliver Green IT?

The world's data centres collectively are said to be producing more carbon emissions than consumers within many countries (Italy, The Netherlands and Argentina are some of the more headline-grabbing examples that have been cited of late). “The whole industry must be more efficient” is an all too common battle cry, in reaction to that. But does that really wash - or is it just more greenwash?

Cloud computing is often cited as a potential solution to the issue of data centres belching out millions of tonnes of CO² but is it really the shining Knight that many are hoping it will become?

The first point of confusion to clear up is that whilst the infrastructure required to host cloud services may not reside within an organisation’s IT department, it does reside somewhere. It will require power and cooling, and it will generate CO² emissions. The real beauty of the cloud is that it delivers economies of scale, and should, if utilised and adopted, reduce the number of servers, racks and data centres that continue to proliferate in many organisations around the globe.

To enable this reduction, we need to get the balance right between demonstrating real bottom-line cost savings to a business, whilst reducing carbon emissions through good practice. Cloud computing should not simply be positioned around looking to cut emissions; it needs to be advocating better utilisation and efficiencies for IT and thus the business. The core benefit is not about lower power consumption, but about a better automated organisation that's able to run more effectively. Being green will be a natural by-product of that.

Server virtualisation is already proving itself as the ‘low hanging fruit’ in reducing overhead. Industry figures indicate that, for every server workload virtualised, hardware and operating costs are reduced by as much as 50% and energy costs by 80%, saving more than £2,500 per year. When you add this to the fact that IT services can be delivered on demand, and that server utilisation can be improved by a ratio of 10:1 or better, the benefits of cloud hosting are hugely attractive. In the past, businesses would have put up with this excess capacity, given the IT department’s risk-aversion, but not so today, it seems.

A recent McKinsey & Co study found that within one media company, almost one-third of the servers in operation had utilisation rates of below 3% and nearly two-thirds of the servers had utilisation rates of below 10%. So it’s not surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has predicted that, if the current trends continued, energy consumption by data centres will almost double to more than 100 billion kWh per year by 2011.

The McKinsey study concluded that the ‘“the greenest data centre is the one that you don’t have to build” and this come back to the biggest advantage of cloud hosting - economies of scale.

Clearly, the benefits of cloud computing can go well beyond any savings that can be made on the Co² emissions or the power bill from the data centre. Indeed, the more effective IT is in support of the core business processes and objectives, the more cloud computing provides a systemic value.

Thus, the danger of claiming that the ‘Cloud is green’ is that people won't see the true holistic benefit of cloud computing as a means of reinventing their IT architecture into a much more flexible and efficient tool for the business.

That effort requires some detailed rethinking and planning and those that jump onto the cloud computing bandwagon, focusing on narrow benefits, such as simple power consumption savings, are missing the real opportunities that the ‘Cloud’ has to offer.

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