Can cloud computing solve the carbon emissions problem of data centers?

Green cloud computing has many benefits: lower costs, faster upgrades, and simpler O & M. From the perspective of social interests, it reduces the environmental burden by reducing carbon emissions.

"The energy use of data centers is an important consideration. Cloud solutions are more efficient than traditional systems ." Eric Woods of Pike Research said.

This is because the carbon footprint of IT has recently increased. According to market research firm Verdantix, the proportion of carbon emissions in the total emissions of devices and services from 2011 to 2020 of the global information and communication technology (ICT) has increased from 2% to 4%.

How is it now? Green cloud?

The green cloud solution saves energy compared with traditional physical systems for three reasons. The first is more efficient provision. Previously, the IT department configured more servers, network devices, and storage architectures, exceeding the required requirements. During peak periods, the business needs to avoid potential capacity problems. As a result, the system they designed has reached the limit utilization cycle, but most of the time the system has surplus.

Business Dynamics also have a place. Sometimes it is difficult for companies to understand and predict the growth of demand and peak load, so they purchase enough capacity, rather excess, indispensable. In addition, the company's budget policy encourages the Department to use all available funds within a certain period of time. Otherwise, less allocation may be obtained in the next year, and financial mistakes may also lead to a certain amount of surplus.

Another benefit of green cloud computing is multi-tenant. The shared data center can operate more efficiently. Similar to the fact that many tenants live in an apartment, they use less energy than their own tenants buy a house. The multi-tenant in the cloud computing architecture reduces the overall energy usage and carbon emissions. In fact, the different demand models of different companies flattened the overall demand peak, making the use model predictable.

Using cloud architecture can also reduce energy consumption by improving server utilization. server utilization is the ratio of the actual use of server capacity. Large-scale cloud computing vendors run their architecture at a higher and more stable utilization level, with higher performance than similar physical operations. Therefore, they can use fewer servers for the same processing capacity. Typical Physical Machine Room applications may run at 5% or 10% utilization, but the same applications may reach 40% or 70% of cloud computing, and the number of users of each machine service increases dramatically.

In fact, servers running at higher utilization consume more energy, and the final improvement is more like compensation through corresponding performance improvement. The increase in the utilization rate from 5% to 20% enables the server to carry 4 times the load, while the server energy consumption may only increase by 10% to 20%.

Economic motives

So what are the potential cost savings? Currently, there is no accurate calculation, but market analysts have listed the reduction in carbon emissions and the reduction in energy consumption costs.

According to the Verdantix survey plan, by 2020, migrating to green cloud computing can reduce the company's carbon emissions by 8.37 million USD each year and reduce energy costs by 12.3 billion US dollars.

Pike Research predicts that the cloud computing center will consume 2020 terawatt per hour in 139.8. If the company does not change the system, the number is 226.4 TWh. The reduction will drive the entire data center's energy consumption from 2010 to 23.3 billion US dollars, and reduce carbon emissions by 2020.

However, potential cost savings may result in unstable conditions. The irony is that large companies tend to make the most of their gains, as they may have used advanced data center architecture design-improving cooling systems and energy-line control-which can already reduce energy loss and consumption.

An Accenture survey found that enterprises with more than 10 thousand of users converted to green cloud computing reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30% to 60%. Enterprises with 1000 employees may be reduced by 60% to 90%, while small enterprises with 100 users will be reduced by 90%.

Such standards may guide servers to evaluate cloud computing.

Woods said: "Today's companies are beginning to focus on environmental issues, and they have become the key to how to make data centers grow ."