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Cloud Computing: Economies of Scale Make the Cloud Greener (or at least less Gray)
Is cloud computing Green? Google says ‘yes’.
Consider three businesses: a small business that runs its own servers to host email for 50 users, a medium-sized business that host its own email with 500 users, and internally hosted email for a large business with 10,000 users. How do these scenarios compare in energy efficiency instead to one where user email accounts are hosted as a cloud service? That’s the question recently investigated by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL) and Northwestern University. The study was sponsored by Google.
The study found that the use of cloud computing was far more energy efficient than on-premise computing. While both on-premise and the cloud need to allocate servers to run the same applications, economies of scale favor cloud computing. More user accounts can be efficiently allocated on a cloud server and cloud servers are also able to share power and cooling resources.
The study assumed that for small and medium-sized businesses to host email on-premise that two servers would need to be allocated: the primary production machine and a second server for backups. For the large company, the assumption was that 10 on-premise primary servers and two backup servers would be needed. To solve the problem, the researchers came up with a model that explains how to best captures the data, and describes the method and science for measuring and analyzing the data.
After crunching the numbers, the study estimates that small businesses need to use 175 kWh/user/year, medium-sized businesses with a denser packing of user accounts on the on-premise servers need only 28.4 kWh/user/year, and large businesses would use 7.6 kWh/user/year.
These estimated numbers compare to numbers actually measured by Google in the running of their Gmail application. Gmail’s energy usage clocks in at less than 2.2 kWh/user/year. They’re able to achieve such a low number by having efficient servers tuned to their email application with a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.16 for their servers.
