Thinking about Clean Clouds

There is a trade-off between efficiency/resource utilization on the one hand and reliability/convenience on the other with regard to cloud computing.  Although use of the term 'cloud computing' provokes images of data, apps and programs residing in some nebulous non-place like a cloud, it is all just moved to a data center somewhere. In order to prevent service outages or downtime, most providers maintain excess capacity meaning that often server utilization rates are "6% to 15%, with 75% of servers using less than 10%." (Glanz, 2012). Many are 'comatose' servers, doing little more than burning electricity and "little if any computational work." (Glanz, 2012).  The studies found that up to 75% of the servers in a given 'farm' were basically idle. 

Servers are not the only energy consumers in data centers however, industrial cooling systems are needed to keep the massive spaces useable.  There are also backup battery installations and chargers necessary to prevent disruptions due to the local electric grid.  In fact, most data centers maintain a stable of diesel generators that kick in whenever the local electrical service grid goes down.  The explosion of consumer data creation, transmission and storage due to the relative cheapness of cloud based centralized computing is leading to an energy useage profile that is simply not sustainable. 

One possible avenue to redress this mismatch is virtualization, which effectively merges multiple servers into one large flexible computing platform that can host a variety of applications or data on a much more rapid scaling basis.  While this may reduce the need to maintain individual excess capacity in computing resources and help improve server utilization rates, it will not reduce the total energy footprint. "Nationwide, data centers used about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or roughly 2 percent of all electricity used in the country that year," noted The new York Times.

Glanz, J. "Power, Pollution and the Internet."  New York Times.  (September 22, 2012). 
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