Green Cloud Computing: A Case for Consumption?

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Much has been made recently about "green" clouds. Along with server agility and data portability, many providers sell public clouds as environmentally friendly. On the surface, green cloud computing makes sense: If data moves from redundant local stacks to a single superserver, especially one shared with other midsize companies, one might expect the natural result to be lower energy consumption and a greener outlook. This is not always the case. Conservation is the current buzzword, but intelligent consumption may provide greater benefits over the long term.

Measure Twice, Scale Once

As discussed by a March 16 Forbes article, several large companies such as Facebook and eBay have provided the code they use to track power and water consumption in their data centers. eBay published its code last year whereas Facebook just went public as part of the Open Compute Project. The social giant split the code into pieces: A user interface component and a back-end data aggregator that can be made to work together or separately depending on business needs…

In a private cloud, this kind of detailed measurement makes sense; being energy- and water-efficient results in excellent PR and lets companies see when they are close to the top end of server and cooling capacity. Scaling up too early means money lost on new hardware when tweaks to code might have fixed the problem; scaling up too late means server failure or data loss. For eBay, intelligent measurement translated to savings of $200 million. What about midsize businesses?…

Read more from the source @ http://midsizeinsider.com/en-us/article/green-cloud-computing-a-case-for-consum

Subscribe to the CloudCow bi-monthly newsletter @ http://eepurl.com/smZeb