Green cloud computing: sustainable digital, indeed

ICT’s increasingly heavy environmental footprint

The reality is that energy consumption due to the cloud – and the Internet in general – is steadily growing, so much so that the ITC sector could soon become a major source of CO2: if data centre efficiency is not increased, the sector could use up to 20% of all electricity consumed and be responsible for 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025.

But then, is digital transformation not sustainable? It is, until the so-called Jevons paradox occurs, that is: a technology that becomes very efficient and spreads exponentially ends up being more polluting than its predecessors.

Cloud and sustainability: a nebulous issue

The major cloud service providers are in a constant competition for who is greener and they all share the same message: moving to the cloud reduces the environmental impact of IT. But is this really true?
What is true is that the big cloud providers are the biggest purchasers of renewable energy, have the lowest PUE values (Power Usage Effectiveness – an indicator used to measure the energy efficiency of a data centre, calculating the ratio between the energy it uses as a whole and that used by IT equipment alone taken individually) and are innovating with efficient, custom-designed equipment.

Data centres and unaccounted emissions

To talk seriously about cloud computing sustainability, however, data centre emissions need to be accounted for and made public. To date, however, companies that have to (or want to) include a report on their environmental footprint in their financial statements and rely on cloud service providers, do not have the necessary data to calculate their emissions using the GHG protocol – Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a reporting system that provides tools and calculation methodologies to measure and quantify their climate-changing gas emissions.

In practice, companies lack the measurement of the energy consumption of the data centres they rely on, from which GHG emissions are derived during the use phase of an IT application running when hosted in the cloud: therefore, data centre emissions and other associated environmental impacts are not accounted for and remain hidden in the cloud itself.

Green computing, or Green cloud computing

While most cloud service providers focus only on renewable energy (could it be because it is the most marketing-friendly action?), on the other hand there are the – few – virtuosos of Green cloud computing, i.e. a sustainable approach to computing that uses several complementary strategies to improve environmental impact. Let us look at the main ones.

1. Renewable energies

The first best practice of the green cloud is the use of renewable energy: the top would be if a data centre was completely energy independent, like the Global Cloud Data Centre, Italy’s largest data centre campus in Ponte San Pietro (Bergamo), which uses its own hydroelectric power plant and a photovoltaic system for its entire energy supply. The alternative is purchase from providers using solar, hydroelectric or wind power.

2. Cooling efficiency

Data centres consume around 50 per cent of energy to keep the temperature of the premises at an appropriate level. Green cloud computing therefore requires the environment to be renovated – or designed from scratch – to be more efficient. A common practice is to move data centres to areas with a colder climate, such as northern Europe, underground or underwater, in sealed containers that allow heat exchange with the surrounding environment.

3. Low-power devices and strategies

Use low-power software and hardware, first of all.
And then virtualise resources and use software-defined infrastructure (SDI) architectures to optimise many inefficient servers into a few compute cores and larger, more efficient storage systems.

4. Optimise software

There are many strategies that can be adopted to reduce server consumption. Some examples? Improve workflows, cache management, internal data centre network traffic and optimise data storage.

2. Cooling efficiency

Data centres consume around 50 per cent of energy to keep the temperature of the premises at an appropriate level. Green cloud computing therefore requires the environment to be renovated – or designed from scratch – to be more efficient. A common practice is to move data centres to areas with a colder climate, such as northern Europe, underground or underwater, in sealed containers that allow heat exchange with the surrounding environment.

3. Low-consumption devices and strategies

Use low-power software and hardware, first of all.
And then virtualise resources and use software-defined infrastructure (SDI) architectures to optimise many inefficient servers into a few compute cores and larger, more efficient storage systems.

4. Optimising software

There are many strategies to be adopted to reduce server consumption. Some examples? Improve workflows, cache management, internal data centre network traffic and optimise data storage.

Digital sustainability: emission calculations and green cloud computing

If Green Cloud Computing seems to be the solution to talk about sustainability in digital in a proven way, the obligation to make emissions data public as of now seems to be the only way to push data centres in the direction of Green Cloud Computing (and for companies to complete their environmental footprint calculations with the data required by the GHG protocol). Sad but true?