Blue Shield "green cloud"--when green computing encounters cloud computing

Objective

IT industry's continuous development and innovation, on the one hand bring more wonderful perfect user experience, on the other hand also in the process of increasing energy consumption on environmental resources caused pressure. Green Environmental protection is our hot topic, cloud computing is the trend of it, when Green computing encounter cloud computing, green cloud can become feasible?

It energy consumption

In the 21st century, when people's environmental consciousness reaches an all-time high, new energy, emission reduction and green economy are increasingly appearing in front of us. In the focus on heavy industry, mineral mining, processing, transportation and other traditional industries energy consumption, we ignore it this new industry has sprung up.

Current IT-related emissions have become one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, with 860 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2007, and a rapid growth in emissions in this sector. Data center energy consumption accounted for 56% of the total cost, including 36% of the power and 20% of the mechanical (refrigeration) costs. And even as people improve energy efficiency in devices and data centers such as equipment and components, global IT-related carbon emissions will reach 1.54 billion tonnes by 2020.

Marvell Technology CEO Zhou Xiwen pointed out that the world every year there are more than 300 million computers, 1.2 billion mobile phones, and more than 100 million TV sets put into use, 10 years after the cumulative is likely to be more than 20 billion sets of electrical appliances. This means that the world will have to build about 200 nuclear power plants to meet this demand.

In the traditional concept, electronic games, software programs and other virtual applications of resources consumption is very low, but the fact is not as people want:

Virtual community Game "Second Life" the individual energy consumption of each virtual role is greater than the average consumption of a Brazilian, a virtual community of 15000 people consumes energy per unit of a small town in Brazil.

Local Web Game "Happy Farm", since 09 has become one of the hotspots, New Year's Day before and after the breakthrough 1 million. According to statistics, happy farm the highest number of active users more than 16 million people, the resulting electricity consumption is amazing.

And as the world's largest search engine, Google consumes 100 million-kilowatt of the electricity per year, if the 5 cents per degree to calculate the words, Google's annual payment of electricity costs amounted to 50 million yuan.

As one critic put it, virtual life has no form, but it leaves traces.

Green Computing

"Green computing" refers to people to reduce the use of information technology hardware energy consumption, such as consideration of power consumption, space occupancy, heat dissipation and other factors to achieve energy saving, environmental protection requirements. One of the traditional ways is to turn off the power or limit the power consumption of the server when the facility is not in use. For example, companies like healthcare are using energy Star, which is said to have saved millions of of dollars.

In order to solve the problem in product design, the following aspects can be reformed:

Chip: Power consumption is a major goal in the design of a chip, and many times it is more important than how fast it can run. The traditional CPU in the same chip produced a large number of transistor structure, and let it run in a very high frequency, the result is CPU chip consumption of electricity and generated more and more heat, increase the energy consumption of the server, and the system design to bring heat is not easy problem. Today, chips made up of 1 billion transistors will leak 60~70 watts of electricity. How to reduce the power consumption per unit of chip under the same performance, this research mainly revolves around the research and development support multi-core, multithreading chip. Companies such as Intel, Sun, ARM and Samsung are investing a lot of human resources in this area, touting their chipset performance per watt rather than simply emphasizing simple performance.

IDC Transformation: IT resources within the enterprise inefficient use, only a very small number of computing resources (about 3%) is really effective use, a large server group brings strong demand for electricity. Existing solutions include: memory power off technology, reduce the power consumption of free memory chips, water-cooled technology, speed up heat dissipation. such as the IBM Power Server provides such a green feature. Digiplex,scandinavian, a data center company, claims that putting servers in their Oslo machine rooms is greener than anywhere else in Europe because 99% of Norway's electricity comes from hydroelectric power.

Software: Increase system usage (7% ~50%) through cloud computing and virtualization technology, thereby reducing the number of servers. Of course, this requires a higher degree of data security and network security.

In addition, the use of more efficient power supply system, the use of dynamic cooling technology to speed up the heat dissipation, the promotion of green PCs and peripherals, photovoltaic energy, pay attention to equipment recycling, etc., are the application of green computing ideas and positive effects.

Cloud

The core idea of cloud computing is to provide a large number of network-connected computing resources/systems/software as a always-on service, which can be run on the hardware devices that provide public services and reduce the actual it resource input.

The three service models for cloud computing include SaaS, PaaS, IaaS.

Figure 1 Cloud computing industry architecture

Saas:software as a service software. It is a way to provide software leasing over the Internet, eliminating the cost of software acquisition by users.

Paas:platform as a service platform. It is an application of the SaaS model and submits the software development platform as a service to the user. The advent of PAAs can accelerate the development of SaaS, especially the development of SaaS applications.

Iaas:infrastructure as a service infrastructure that serves. Consumers can get services from a sophisticated computer infrastructure through the Internet.

In the past two years, cloud-related application services have been gradually promoted worldwide through Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce and other big it giants.

Microsoft's cloud-based operating system, Windows Azure, was officially commercially available in 2010, with the main goal of providing a platform for developers to help develop applications that run on cloud servers, data centers, the Web, and PCs. Cloud developers can use Microsoft's Global data center's storage, computing power and network infrastructure services. The Azure Service platform includes the following major components:

L Windows Azure;

L Microsoft SQL database service, Microsoft. NET services;

• Live services for sharing, storing, and synchronizing files;

L for business Microsoft Share Point and Microsoft Dynamics CRM services.

and Salesforce.com as the world's first formal provider of commercial applications in the past 10 years has been a great success, the annual revenue has been more than 1.4 billion U.S. dollars, more than 72,500 paid customers, cloud computing as a mature technology platform for the world's many businesses to provide a good solution. Salesforce.com is not only responsible for physical and environmental security, but also provides infrastructure, application and data-related security-control solutions that greatly reduce the user's responsibility and human and material requirements in running and using.