Is your company cloud computing? Sentilla help you make up your mind

As cloud computing has just sprung up, there has been a heated debate about whether this service is greener, and now Sentilla, a data center monitoring service company, has launched a new analytics tool to help you predict how smart it is to move your company's IT services to the cloud and how much you can save.

Sentilla's tools take account of a variety of customer factors, including the purchase of equipment, personnel costs, maintenance costs, software licensing, and power consumption, while helping customers determine whether to adopt cloud computing services. But because the tool granularity is not enough to drill into the overall decision on the power cost of the impact, it will be a valuable way to highlight the efficiency of energy-efficient or not cloud computing can be on the individual.

Jonathan Koomey, an energy expert at the data center, points out that because cloud computing has a scale effect and can meet diverse needs, it is more flexible in deployment and more efficient than IT services in-house.

It is reported that Verdantix, a research firm sponsored by At&t, will save up to $12.3 billion trillion in energy costs through cloud computing by 2020, which would amount to 85.7 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year if carbon emissions are calculated. An environmental and energy study conducted by Microsoft, Accenture and WSP last year found that moving the company's IT business to the cloud could reduce the company's carbon footprint by 30% to 90%.

But the study also found that cloud computing is not necessarily the most efficient way to compute energy, and in some cases cloud computing may consume more energy than ordinary office computing. Rod Tucker of the University of Melbourne and his team have found that cloud computing can save energy because it makes it easier to consolidate servers, but it's not energy efficient to look at three different cloud applications--storage, software, and running.

Computing and the Internet are becoming more important, and they are also consuming more and more energy. Koomey's research suggests that global data centers accounted for 1.3% of total electricity consumption in 2010, or even 2% in the US. As a result, more energy-efficient choices, such as virtualized data centers, are becoming more popular.