Cloud as foundation for sustainable organisations

Wed, 1st Jun 2011

FYI, this story is more than a year old

The inherent characteristics of Cloud computing – including scalability, elasticity, sharing, dynamic provisioning and consuming according to need – would naturally mean more efficient computing. Particularly from an energy consumption viewpoint, it would ideally lead to a reduced environmental footprint.However, not all Cloud sustainability is equal. As with several other ‘disruptive technologies', Cloud has no universally accepted definition. This creates ambiguity about Cloud being superior to other computing models on a number of grounds, including environmental concepts. From a sustainability perspective, an important broad distinction to make is between the Private and Public Cloud models. A Public Cloud, due to its economies of scale and inherent high degree of infrastructure sharing between many different customers is likely to yield bigger energy/carbon savings than a Private Cloud.These two basic models can each be further divided into sub-models, which can differ in their environmental characteristics. An Internal Private Cloud (hosted in the customers' own data center) may be a less efficient option than a Hosted Private Cloud (hosted in the Cloud vendor's data center), as the latter data center would be expected to be more optimised.There are four key areas that contribute to Cloud being more sustainable than other computing models:

Data Centers
Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure
Enablement effects
Water and waste

Data Centers – the critical foundationThe critical foundation for any Cloud solution is the data center which houses the servers, storage and network equipment which together deliver the total solution. The data center operator has the task of delivering continuous power to the ICT equipment, whilst ensuring the ICT is kept within strict temperature and humidity thresholds.The industry's drive to increase energy efficiency across the data center can be seen by the significant number of initiatives launched to help data center operators measure and improve their operations, e.g. in the areas of standardisation metrics and best practices.The Cloud provides an opportunity to integrate the ICT with the data center infrastructure, providing a highly energy efficient environment. For example, newer data centers allow cooling, the largest source of energy consumption within the data center after the IT, to react to the dynamic nature of the Cloud. The data center grows or shrinks in direct response to Cloud utilisation, optimising energy consumption.Most importantly, every element of the data center needs addressing, from highly efficient cooling to water consumption. It's the combination of all of the individual elements which provide the ideal platform for the Cloud.IT Infrastructure – the backbone of CloudIT infrastructure refers to those hardware, software and network elements supporting Cloud services. Cloud-based infrastructure typically provides a number of ‘green' benefits due to the following characteristics:

Multi tenancy – sharing of infrastructure between customers resulting in less overall energy usage.
Optimal server utilisation – compared to in-house data centers, which typically have very low utilisation.
Dynamic Provisioning – reduces over-allocation of hardware as Cloud vendors provision according to intelligent demand analysis.
Minimisation of Embodied carbon – Cloud providers are more skilled at life cycle management of equipment (e.g. procurement, refresh and disposal), which means minimum ‘embodied' carbon.
Infrastructure matched for purpose – by giving preference to equipment that is power efficient, has energy saving functions, is recyclable and has a smaller physical footprint.
Energy efficient client devices – the Cloud model works well with small, energy efficient devices and will therefore naturally encourage their take-up at the expense of more power-hungry alternatives.
Application optimisation – Cloud providers are more likely to assist with making application code and configuration optimally efficient.

Cloud's Enablement Potential – crowning achievementThe generally cited green benefits of the Cloud relate mostly to the ICT infrastructure. These are normally the most obvious and immediate green benefits. The greatest potential environmental benefits of the Cloud may well turn out to be the way in which Cloud services facilitate environmental improvements in the processes of the organisations using them. This is what we refer to as the enablement effect and it should not be underestimated.Cloud-based environmental enablement solutions include applications which support the ‘Intelligent Society'. These can deliver significant environmental benefits using sensing technologies, data networks and mobile solutions to transform how industries deliver their services.Examples of applications for the ‘Intelligent Society' using Cloud supported sensor networks are:Smart Traffic Cloud - Sensor networks gather real-time information on road and traffic conditions allowing greater efficiency and safety of vehicle and pedestrian flows. Smart Agriculture Cloud - By capturing data on the climate, soil and water, as well as crop conditions through field located cameras and sensors; it will become possible to devise new business models that secure better harvest yields with lower expenditures of labour and energy. Smart Water Cloud - Similar to Smart Grids for energy networks, this solution facilitates improved capacity management by building intelligence about the supply and demand of water. This allows the optimum efficiency of water production and usage through real time information gathering in the environmental aspects such as quality and drainage.Water and Waste – the green footprintGreen ICT benefits, whether for Cloud or other IT deployment models, are normally expressed in terms of energy and/or carbon savings. Additional environmental aspects, notably water usage and e-waste are rising up the customers' agendas.At a very high level it is probably reasonable to assume that the volume of water used, and e-waste generated, would be less with the Cloud model than with other deployment models. The main reasons being that Cloud tends to optimise both hardware usage and energy usage, i.e. less hardware means less water required during manufacturing and less to dispose of creating less e-waste, and less energy usage means less water required in the electricity generation process. But for today's CIOs, perhaps the biggest difficulty in making comparisons is defining exactly what we mean by ‘the Cloud'. This makes defining the ‘As is' and ‘To be' positions a problematic exercise for many CIOs and their organisations. If a company migrates its IT services from internal data centers to those of an external Cloud vendor, is this a move to the Cloud or simply a good old-fashioned data center outsource?There is never likely to be industry-wide agreed definition, so cross-vendor comparisons are always going to have to be examined with much care by CIOs. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that most Cloud migrations, in common with most other major IT service upgrades, almost always involve a degree of business transformation. The IT post-migration is therefore normally different in usage and scale, making ‘apples-with-apples' comparison difficult. Whilst there is no simple answer, It seems fairly evident at least that, per unit of computing work (however that is defined), Cloud will normally be greener than alternatives. The result for any given Cloud implementation, though, will vary depending on a variety of factors. These include how efficient the infrastructure pre-Cloud migration is, whether the transition is to a Private or Public Cloud, and the geography involved (as the carbon emissions intensity of power generation varies so widely across countries). It will also, of course, depend on the perspective being taken. If a company moves to the Cloud, it may reduce the direct carbon footprint of that company, as it has shifted a portion of its energy consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) to the Cloud provider.Therefore, it could be said that that company has become ‘greener'. In most cases, there will also be a net carbon reduction, due to the greater energy efficiency of the Cloud provider's IT infrastructure and data center.