This afternoon on Twitter, Reuven Cohen shared a link to a post by Kathrin Winkler, Sr. Director and Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC Corporation, on The Greener Computing Option. Halfway through the post, Kathrin shares the following on why Cloud Computing is the Greener Computing Option:
“Information technology is estimated to account for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And the hardware industry is still a far cry from the "cradle-to-cradle" model that avoids the creation of industrial waste and the depletion of non-renewable resources. On the other hand, IT is absolutely fundamental to mitigating "the other 98%", optimizing the use of natural resources, and shifting to a low-carbon economy.
Cloud computing holds great promise in both fronts. Granted, it’s not all proven out yet, but here’s where some of the potential lies:
- Shared resources can eliminate redundancies. It’s simple economy of scale.
- Dynamically-assigned resource pools means that spare capacity isn’t sitting around drawing power in as many places or as many configurations.
- Clouds can provide what you might call "overdraft protection"; that is, data centers can run at higher utilization if they know they can draw on "the cloud" in the event of an unexpected peak in demand.
- Location independence could mean the ability to move services to physical facilities where power is cleaner or used more efficiently. The tyranny of the speed of light will certainly limit "follow the moon" – changing longitudes daily to take advantage of evening cooling . But it could work for some applications; more will be able to "follow the seasons"; shifting biannually by latitude to take advantage of winter cooling.
- Properly instrumented, clouds will be able to inform consumers of their environmental (energy, carbon, etc.) impact , to enable them to be accountable for their choices.
- Clouds can provide an elastic infrastructure to enable "retro-commissioning" of more traditional infrastructure. I heard a CIO in NYC the other day say that one of the biggest challenges to keeping up with best practices is that any changes to his data center were like "changing the engine in a car while it’s speeding at 70 MPH down the road". What if that infrastructure could be temporarily extended into the cloud, the applications shifted, the infrastructure upgrade, and the applications shifted "home" again?
- For C2C (Cradle-to-Cradle) devotees, note that Cloud Computing is a product service model, in which the provider’s financial results are tied to getting more out of the hardware, rather than getting more hardware out of the factory.
- Clouds hold the potential for rapid connection between disparate sources of people and data to accelerate innovation to address all sorts of environmental challenges. See The Sustainability Potential of Cloud Computing.”
Of this list, location independence can certainly offset some of the impact of organizations increased appetites due to the availability of cloud computing resources. This conversation will only get more interesting, and precise, as the year progresses.
