Cloud companies providing SaaS should be able to get much higher utilization on their machines. If they are running a large, scale-out service, the demand is more predictable and the utilization can be adjusted with fine granularity when adding capacity.

As for the startups, I think John McBride makes a good point. It is likely a number of these startups would have been created anyway, just with higher fixed and upfront costs. This makes them less likely to succeed. If the startup does become self-sustaining I consider it a net win, even though they are increasing electricity use, because they are creating wealth.

Finally, last earth day I considered the efficiency and greenness of cloud computing and how my usage of S3 for backup compares to buying an extra hard disk. My numbers are probably not very accurate, but they shouldn’t be more than an order of magnitude off.

At Dharmafly, we spent quite a while hunting for decent renewable energy servers (the result of the hunt is here). However, we increasingly find that our web apps and APIs would benefit from a cloud setup.

But there aren’t any cloud platforms that run on renewable energy. Without it though, cloud computing can’t possibly deliver scalability and reliability in the deepest sense.

To me, learning more about the greenness of the cloud is kinda like studying the aerodynamic characteristics of a 8 cylinder diesel pickup truck. Or determining the carbon footprint of a website.

I really like the trend towards efficiency in personal computing. For example, oled monitors, solid state drives and new battery tech. I think we can get a bigger bang for our philosophical dollar by contemplating the role of the average worker in greening the cloud.

Or how about research correlating cloud computing with the greening of the planet?

Thanks for taking the time to write the post. I’ll share the analogy -it’s really useful.

twitter: Brent_Norris

I worked in an organistion where we were asked by the CIO to state how much energy was saved by using virtualisation (supposedly from CPU cycle saving), we gave an answer based on data quoted by the VM software vendor.

Ideally we would have had the opportunity to characterise the ‘real’ CPU energy usage against the virtual usage before making a dubious claim about how much energy we saved!

I think we could have saved alot more by dimensioning the server farm correctly rather than playing safe and deploying way too much capacity (IMO).