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Cloudy with a chance of green

Lezette Engelbrecht
By Lezette Engelbrecht, ITWeb online features editor
Johannesburg, 09 Feb 2011

The buzz word at every conference from networking to security to business solutions this past year has continued to be that puff of magic data storage in the sky, the cloud.

Its promise and pitfalls have been dissected, debated, contested and championed, but cloud computing is here to stay and, with it, the implications it has for businesses, individuals and the environment.

In Accenture's “Technology vision 2011” report this week, it notes the emerging world of IT is one in which data is king. The firm predicts cloud computing will become so pervasive that the term itself will be superfluous.

While most of the big tech players, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have been singing the cloud's praises as a “greener” computing solution, some criticism has seeped in by means of independent studies and the environmental protection agency, Greenpeace.

Greenpeace's biggest gripe is the fact that cloud computing, however much it cuts down on physical infrastructure and the maintenance involved, drives a whole new level of data consumption.

With devices like the iPad becoming increasingly popular, so does the use of cloud-based services such as downloading video, music and other data. Greenpeace argues the cloud's rise is synonymous with a leap in demand for energy and a subsequent increase in GHG emissions. It predicts the electricity guzzled by the world's data centres and telecommunications networks -"the main components of cloud-based computing” - will triple between 2007 and 2020.

If the data centres required to meet this demand are powered by coal, then the cloud quickly gains a murky tinge. Greenpeace's concern isn't so much the data centres themselves as where they are situated and how this affects the way they're powered.

The agency has come down hard on companies like Facebook, which chose to build its two new data centres in Oregon and North Carolina, from utilities that generate a majority of their electricity from coal.

Greenpeace released a video urging the social network to “unfriend coal” last year, a campaign which has now gathered 600 000 supporters on Facebook. Most recently, the agency asked the social networking giant to support clean energy and make a public statement by Earth Day, on 22 April, making official its commitment to stop the use of coal to power its booming network.

With 600 million users, 250 million of whom log in every day, Facebook needs a truckload of servers to keep up to speed with all the posts, pictures and applications that are constantly added. This monstrous appetite for data is driving an equally monstrous demand for electricity. Greenpeace notes in its “Make IT green” report that the amount of electricity produced and consumed to power the Internet alone would place it fifth if ranked among countries' electricity consumption.

Cloud proponents, however, argue that using fewer servers and hardware through virtualisation and by paying for services as needed, energy consumption can be lowered. A Pike Research report, released late last year, predicts cloud computing could reduce global data centre energy expenditures by 38% in 2020, compared to a business as usual scenario.

Our monstrous appetite for data is driving an equally monstrous demand for electricity.

Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb

It points out that clouds offer improved utilisation and fewer operating costs than traditional data centres. The firm predicts much of the work done today in internal data centres will be outsourced to the cloud by 2020, bringing significant reductions in energy consumption, associated energy expenses, and GHG emissions.

The tricky thing about all these predictions and stats, the yeas versus the nays, is that different aspects of the cloud are being used to support different findings. Some, like prominent cloud fan Microsoft, use studies to show that moving to an on-demand cloud computing model can help companies reduce CO2 emissions by 30% or more.

But then there's the flip side. Researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, looked at some of the less-examined elements of cloud computing. They found that, at high-usage levels, transporting data in the cloud can suck a lot more energy than is required to store it. Also, the building of private clouds within most enterprises is usually in addition to existing servers, almost never a replacement.

Overall, the researchers predict the technology used in cloud computing will continue to become more energy-efficient. But they add it's essential to improve the energy efficiency of data transport, especially as cloud computing becomes more widespread.

The research team leader touches on the selective nature of many studies, explaining that some papers, which claim cloud computing provides a “greener” alternative, fail to include the energy consumption involved in transporting data from the user to the cloud. “In many cases, we find that the data centre used by the cloud-based services is located in another city, state or even country.”

Like many aspects of what has been dubbed green IT, cloud computing is still floating somewhere in the middle shades, and will remain there for some time. Considering all the dimensions of the cloud and the environmental impacts they have, there is no clear-cut answer on its green credentials. Rather, a more nuanced picture is emerging, dependent on varying circumstances. This doesn't make for catchy headlines or neat summations, but helps inform a more realistic view of the cloud's capabilities.

For now, it looks to be some time before we see the complete environmental benefits of the cloud. Like in other parts of the clean energy sector, things are likely to get worse before they get better, with the cloud first driving increased energy demand before super-efficient methods become widespread and begin saving. At present, the cloud model appears neither an environmental sinner nor a saint, and so remains suspended between the two extremes, a floating promise in the sky.

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