Is the Cloud Green?
I don't have to go far these days to find some pushback on cloud computing that cites its increasing carbon footprint, including this report from guardian.co.uk on "The dark side of cloud computing: soaring carbon emissions." And, of course, Greenpeace is getting up in the grill of cloud computing with their recent report focused on the release of the iPad driving the construction of many new data centers.
This flies in the face of more traditional thinking around cloud computing where the positive green impact is typically on the first few slides of the sales presentations. Indeed, the number of posts and articles that promote cloud computing as green date back to the re-launching of the old "cloud computing" buzzword to define the reemerging practice of sharing IT resources with others.
So, who's right? They both are, really.
The truth is that cloud computing will initially expand the growth of the data center as we stand up new and shared cloud computing resources, while at the same time maintaining legacy data centers to support traditional IT. Thus the carbon footprint of IT, at least initially, is bound to go up over the next several years as businesses transition to the cloud.
However, the end game here is to provide a cost-efficient, scalable, and shareable platform that, through the use of a multi-tenant architecture and better utilization of hardware resources, should ultimately reduce the power consumption requirements significantly over the same number of applications and users residing within traditional corporate data centers. If the "green movement" does not understand those goals, and constantly pushes back on the use of shared cloud computing resources, then they are hurting their own cause.
They do have a point, however, in looking at the number of data-hungry new systems that are quickly ramping up, typically around the use of mobile devices, which keep everything in the cloud. The largest offender is social networking. Facebook's new data center, for example, is as big as a blimp hangar and runs primarily on coal -- and is required mostly to store such vital information as my preferences for hamburgers and "on the treadmill now" status updates.
The truth is that IT is currently only responsible for about 2 percent of the world's carbon footprint. That may go up to 2.5 percent at some point in order to get back to 1.5 percent at some point in the future. So I suspect that the green movement's time would be better spent focusing on SUVs and tax credits for wind power. However, that's just not as sexy as pushing back in a space that everyone is focused on right now.
