Cloud computing has been advertised lately as the way to go if you want to show off with your green IT achievements. A new report from Berkeley Lab now proves this is true and you can even calculate how green would your company’s IT infrastructure be if you switched to cloud computing.
The publicly available model can be used by anyone to see the impact of various scenarios on energy consumption and, indirectly, on the carbon emissions of cloud computing. Katie Fehrenbacher from GigaOM went to the event called “How Green Is the Internet?,” organized by Google, and found out that the study can really convince even the most skeptical IT managers.
Cloud computing is greener because the average servers used by small and medium companies are not as efficient as those used by specialized IT companies, as well as other parts of the system such as cooling or the source of electricity that cloud computing companies use – wind or solar power.
Below is a video from that conference, where the Cloud Energy and Emissions Research Model, or CLEER, is being discussed by Eric Masanet from Northwestern University (the first speaker).
http://youtu.be/pwh9qk_dTqo
Going green not only means switching from a dirty energy source to a clean, renewable one, but also using as little power as possible and optimizing the entire efficiency chain from hardware to software. It looks like cloud computing can do this easily and let you think of things you actually like doing (how many times have you heard that, huh?).
