Conference organising company iQuest contacted me last year to ask me to deliver a keynote presentation at their Green IT Summit.
The event took place in Dublin yesterday and my keynote talk entitled “Green IT – driving efficiency, sustainability and enabling efficient working practices” is above.
The organisers prudently decided that they didn’t want to take the risk of any of their international speakers not making it to the event because of the ashcloud. This would have left them with a hole in the schedule at the last minute so they contracted the services of OnlineMeetingRooms and three of the presenters were able to present to the audience in Dublin, over an online video connection, without having to travel!
The title I was asked to present on was quite broad and I had 30 minutes to try cover it all so I had to go at quite a clip but the feedback has been extremely positive so it seemed to work out very well.
It’s reasonable to assume, until proven otherwise, that ‘cloud computing’ is not very energy-efficient at all. Virtualisation can be, of course, but ‘cloud computing’ tends to entail keeping many computers running (albeit in low power mode), doing nothing, waiting for someone to use them. I can’t really see how it would usually be more energy-efficient for most applications.
This comment was originally posted on Greenmonk: the blog
It’s not that cloud computing is or isn’t green. The real problem is that we have no easy way to prove or dis-prove it other than a gut feeling . In most cases the cloud is probably more environmentally friendly compared to that of under-utilized data center alternatives.
So is cloud computing green-er than the thousands of servers sitting idle in data centers our the globe? Probably. Is it green-er than turning off your computing and doing nothing, probably not.
This comment was originally posted on Greenmonk: the blog
Save yourself 10 minutes: The argument in the video goes “It’s not green because more people will use it to do more stuff which will over-compensate for the savings” rather than “It’s less green than dedicated servers or VPS” since the latter is patently false.
On that basis you could argues that “electric cars are not green” because people will drive more often if it costs less. Right?
This comment was originally posted on Greenmonk: the blog
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.
This comment was originally posted on Greenmonk: the blog
@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.
This comment was originally posted on Greenmonk: the blog
@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…
This comment was originally posted on Greenmonk: the blog