Comments on: Just how green is cloud computing?

By: The ‘green’ PUE monster… « JANWIERSMA.COM

The ‘green’ PUE monster… « JANWIERSMA.COM — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:07:40 +0000

[...] See GreenMonk – Simon Wardley on ‘Cloud & Green’ [...]

By: CSC and The Sustainable Cloud, RAM as an energy metric – James Governor's Monkchips

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:08:58 +0000

[...] and The Sustainable Cloud, RAM as an energy metric Tweet Tom Raftery recently wrote a piece calling for public cloud providers to be more open about the energy footprints of their services to allow for customer and consumer benchmarking. You might expect the likes of Amazon and Google [...]

By: CloudFucius Shares: Cloud Research and Stats « psilva's blog

CloudFucius Shares: Cloud Research and Stats « psilva's blog — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:10:51 +0000

[...] Just how green is cloud computing? (2010) [...]

By: Coté's People Over Process » Links for April 28th

Coté's People Over Process » Links for April 28th — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:10:14 +0000

[...] Just how green is cloud computing? — GreenMonk: the blogRT @TomRaftery: Why Google et al's cloud offerings are not Green [...]

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:36:49 +0000

@ian – The Electric Car comparison is unfortunate I think. If people drive more because it is cheaper in Electric Cars, as long as they source their power from renewable sources, there is limited environmental impact.

@Simon – I think you may have gone to the other extreme with the above response Perhaps you could say another few explanatory words around componentisation, co-evolution and price elasticity effects for the uninitiated…

By: Wednesday data center tidbits: #cloudcomputing security and green-ness road apples. « The Server Room

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:36:44 +0000

[...] up is a piece questioning if cloud computing is really green at all. Um, no, you don’t have to wonder. Replace 10 underutilized dedicated physical servers with a [...]

By: Simon Wardley

Simon Wardley — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:26:04 +0000

@ian: not quite.
I’ll try not to ramble so much, next time.
On one side of the argument you have efficiency of resource usage and on the other you have componentisation, co-evolution and price elasticity effects. Your electric car analogy simply refers to price elasticity and ignores the more powerful componentisation consequences.

By: Server in den Wolken » Blog Archive » Heute in Cloud Computing – 28.04.2010

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:14:19 +0000

[...] via Greenmonk.net [...]

By: Cloud Energy Consumption: Google, Twitter and the Systems Vendors — GreenMonk: the blog

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:04:21 +0000

[...] Tom posed a question: just how green is cloud computing? We have been frankly disappointed by Cloud computing providers reticence to start publishing [...]

By: Joe Drumgoole

Joe Drumgoole — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:00:36 +0000

Its not that Cloud Computing isn’t green, its that computing isn’t green. For Cloud vendors to produce these stats they need support from the OS vendors. For OS vendors to produce this information they need support from the hardware vendors.

However cloud vendors are highly motivated to provide this information for several reasons. Firstly carbon tax will hit them hardest and just about every jurisdiction I know of is going to wallop a carbon tax on computing (or indirectly through electricity) at some point in the future. Secondly from a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) perspective they know being green is good. It would certainly influence my choice of hosting vendor to know they were “greener” than the competition.

Cloud Computing vendors have the buying power to influence the hardware and software vendors to support carbon counting initiatives and their ability to pass on these costs to their customers (in the same way as they charge for transactions, bandwidth and storage) can clearly influence their customers behaviour as well.

In short when carbon measurement capabilities start appearing as standard on Dell, Sun, HP and IBM hardware expect it to appear on IaaS dashboards shortly thereafter.