Data Centers used 0.93% of all electricity produced in the entire USA, but the number has gone up now. Erikir Hrafnsson, CEO of Green Qloud blames the internet with cloud computing for adding on the carbon emissions and escalating the use of dirty energy. He pointed this out in 2013.
Now, when the burgeoning global temperature has risen and manifested its ill effects in ice caps melting and rising sea level, IT companies have acknowledged it and are gradually turning towards renewable energy. Google has become the world’s first company to switch to using electricity produced from renewable energy sources. The sitch has opened new avenues for data center cleaning services too.
Shifting from Net Zero Model to Absolute Zero Model
Companies are now shifting from a balancing model of emitting and compensate to absolute zero. It means the company will not produce any carbon emissions in the first place. If we compare the results and computing power, the search engine giant is now delivering 7 times the computing power with the same amount of energy as used five years earlier.
Challenges in Reducing Carbon Emissions
The Environmental Protection Agency has found that data centers consume 1.5% of all the energy produced in the USA. The carbon emissions have quadrupled crossing the 680 million tons per year mark by 2020. It means that data centers are causing more environmental damage than the aviation industry.
Data centers operate only on 20-30% of power assigned to them and the rest of the 60-70% power is lost in over-provisioned resources that are idle. Changing to use cloud computing and shared space helps in powering data centers efficiently and reduces the overall negative impact on the environment as per Lisa Rhodes, VP of Marketing and Sales at Verne Global.
How Can Cloud Computing help in Lowering Carbon Emissions?
Robert Heininger in his paper IT Service Management in a Cloud Environment says that Green Computing enthusiasts are working to design more energy-efficient clouds that have clean and green features, such as: –
- Power Management
- Virtualization
- High-Performance Computing
- Load balancing
- Green data center
- Reusability
- Recyclability
These are principles on which technology is treading to produce greener models of cloud technology. In today’s time, it is crucial to understand what is Cloud Computing?
Infrastructural changes
Most of the energy is lost in transmitting energy to long distances. Public cloud data centers are now built closer to the place from where it takes electricity. Most of the companies do not have the capital to materialize this.
Cloud computing data centers use less energy as their hardware is much more sophisticated and scalable. So, they provide security, power backup, and powers HVAC systems in a lesser amount of energy as against traditional data centers.
Efficient use of energy
100% efficiency is almost impossible to achieve, but we can choose not to exploit resources when we can. Companies have huge turnovers and millions to spare to install private data centers at each location. Their utilization rate is very low. If we compare it with the cloud, this idle computing power can be utilized escalating the utilization ratio by 2-4 times and promoting energy-efficient usage. When hardware is receiving energy all the time without any using its computational capability, it is adding to carbon emissions.
Repair and Replacement
Traditional data centers do not replace their hardware unless they stop working altogether. Upgrading the software or changing the components of a data center adds to cost and time. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s findings were astonishing as it found that using internal email or other collaborative software such as ERP and CRM to cloud nationally can save enough electricity to power Los Angeles for one year.
For optimizing the hardware, dynamic voltage frequency scaling technology (DVFS) or dynamic power management (DPM) is incorporated. Distributed and grid computing are energy-efficient ways to run the software in a data center. A study in 2009 proposed the use of a Heuristic Algorithm based on VMDMT or Virtual Machine Dynamic Migration Technology for better optimization of distribution strategy of VMs. The study reflected that this arrangement used 27% less energy than traditional cloud servers.
Thermal Management
Energy can be saved by changing the layout and connection of components of a data center to allow the flow of hot and cool air by using an intelligent environment controlling technology that maintains temperature according to changing climatic conditions.
Data centers can be installed at places where the outside temperature remains less than 13 degrees Celsius for a quarter of a year. Findings of the GENETiC project were published as Integrated Energy Efficient Data Centre Management for Green Cloud Computing. Researchers revealed that a smart management system of a data center can be adopted that consumes energy as per the workload of computing requests, cooling systems, and waste heat recovery.
Following suit, Amazon has committed to power its data centers 100% with renewable energy by 2025. Moving to a greener cloud saves 84% power and we are yet to see the impact on reliability on green energy.