Zen and the Art of Data Center Greening (and Energy Efficiency)

I have thought about the link between cloud computing and energy/GHG emissions reduction. Greener Computing published an article on the subject, referring to a white paper by NetSuite, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. The original press release by NetSuite is here

The white paper concludes that:

NetSuite operates in an energy-efficient manner, using the latest technologies to reduce its energy use.
Green benefits resulting from NetSuite’s efficiency, and from its customers using NetSuite’s solution rather than operating their own servers, are significant and include energy use reduction, cost reduction, and improved employee productivity. The aggregate reduction in electricity used by NetSuite and its customers is approximately 595 million kilowatt hours (kWh) per year—the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of more than 56,000 homes. This results in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by more than 423,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, the equivalent of:

CO2 emissions produced by the consumption of more than 48 million gallons of gasoline;
CO2 emissions produced by the consumption of approximately 985,000 barrels of oil;
And the yearly pollution caused by more than 77,000 automobiles.

NetSuite’s SaaS platform enables customers to reduce overall server room electric consumption by more than 99 percent, representing a decrease in cost of more than $10,300 per customer per year. This energy savings further improves the customer’s return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) versus traditional on-premise IT solutions.
The customer’s cost savings are in addition to the reduced software, hardware, maintenance, personnel, and occupancy costs resulting from implementing NetSuite’s software as a service platform. Such reductions in upfront and ongoing costs can exceed $100,000 per year.

In case it isn’t obvious from that description, what it means is as follows: the energy reduction with cloud computing is so big that the combination of all the power consumed by NetSuite’s customers and NetSuite itself for running data centers is smaller than the sum of the power consumption by the same customers without using cloud computing.

Outsourced data centers and cloud computing providers are more energy efficient because professional data center operators tend to run their data centers more efficiently (because it is their core business) than their customer companies whose core business is something other than running data centers. On top of that, because multitenancy makes more effective use of power/energy, further energy efficiency is established.

That’s the theory, and it seems convincing, but until now no actual energy saving numbers had been published to validate it. This study is a good quantitative assessment of how we can accomplish green with the use of cloud computing. I, however, would like to obtain the average saving per customer, which can easily be computed from the total number of NetSuite’s customers that participated in the study. Since NetSuite is a public company, I wonder why it did not publish the total number of its cloud computing customers for this study. According to NetSuite’s Web page, it has thousands of customers worldwide. It is not possible for me to find out how the customers were selected or how many of them were selected for this study.

With more quantitative data like this, we should be able to come up with a good guideline for companies of all sizes to use in deciding whether to outsource their data centers.

Tags: Cloud computing GHG emissions Outsourced data centers

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Cloud Computing and GHG Emissions Reduction