How Cloud Computing Can Realize Green Computing

Environmentalism and Cloud computing are two most talked-about subjects. With the rising impact of IT on the environment, the two concepts have come together giving rise to Green Computing. Going green is now becoming the preferred IT philosophy and the companies are now working on delivering computing in a more efficient and environment-friendly way.

To achieve better resource utilization and efficiency, cloud service providers are developing energy efficient cloud systems through “Virtualization”. Though the concept is nothing new, its potential has been fully tapped with the construction of new data centres. It has transformed computing into a utility that can be scaled according to the ever-increasing demand. By consolidation of sub-utilized servers in the form of multiple “virtual machines” sharing the same server, businesses can gain in the form of energy, space, and management.

Following five key reasons have enabled the computing to go the green way:

Scalable Computing with Automation

Traditional data centres rely heavily on hardware and physical infrastructure to meet customer requirements. They end up dedicating more infrastructure than required to handle unpredictable spikes in user demand and ensure quality of services even during peak hours. But to dedicate hundreds of servers to handle such peak load during intermittent periods in a year is not energy efficient. Such situations can be managed by cloud-based infrastructure.

To quickly provision, move, and scale workloads; cloud based infrastructure uses automation software which can maintain active servers and allocate resources depending on the current demand. By switching to automation, less physical infrastructure is needed which in return maximizes the resource efficiencies.

Load Balancing with Optimization

Traditional Load balancing solutions are not capable of handling dynamic enterprise network strategies and requirements, in particular, the distribution of users and architecture.

Contemporary load balancing is based on a simple Round Robin technique. The load balancer sends one connection to each server in turn from the top of the list to the end. This load balancing is not load-aware, which leads to either server under-utilization or overburdening, since the next server in turn may or may not be the right choice.

Where traditional load balancing falls short, cloud computing comes to the rescue. Cloud technology takes load balancing to a whole new level by delivering improved system response time and optimizing resources. Not only does it guarantee finest global traffic management, it helps reduce carbon emission. By distributing load across multiple servers efficiently, it prevents overheating and reduces the amount of energy consumed.

Data Centres for energy efficiency

Ultimately, if cloud providers want to develop a truly green cloud, they must use their power to make data centre operations green.

As awareness of carbon footprint and energy use associated with technology becomes widespread, cloud computing companies are pursuing strategies to reduce energy consumption and emission of their data centres. They are working to combine cloud data centres with renewable sources of electricity.

Pay-As-You-Use Service

The pay-as-you-use nature of cloud-based services ensures users consume only what they need and nothing beyond. The pay-as-you-use and self-service feature of cloud-based infrastructure go hand in hand. Energy and resource efficiencies improve simultaneously.

Multi-tenancy

The approach of Multi-tenancy enables different organizations or different business units within the same organization to take advantage of a common cloud-based infrastructure. This decreases the overall energy consumption and associated carbon emissions.

Along with automation, the ratio between peak and average loads becomes lesser with a multi-tenant setup which in turn reduces the requirement for additional infrastructure. Diminishing fluctuations in demand lead to better prediction and results in greater energy savings.