On the face of it, the answer to this question should presumably be resoundingly affirmative. With far more efficient utilisation of available compute resources, economies of scale in staffing and infrastructure, and a tendency to site the bigger data centres in areas blessed with natural cooling and abundant green-ish power, the answer is surely obvious. How could a Cloud be any less Green than all those on-premise data centres, full of woefully under-utilised computers that endlessly pump waste heat toward a roof filled to overflowing with heat exchangers and power-guzzling air conditioning units?

Surely, as world leaders fall over themselves to exhort someone else to make the painful decisions ahead of Copenhagen, Cloud Computing is the technology community’s contribution to making sure the world is still here for our children to inherit and enjoy?

Chris Thorman has an interesting post that is unusual in actually trying to apply some real numbers to the discussion. In it, he looks quite specifically at the direct energy costs of running a particular medical application on-premise or hosted by a third party;

“On-premise software is what most people think of when they think of a software system. You pop in a CD or download a big file from the Internet and the install begins. Files are copied to your computer and/or a server machine, where they are stored and run. Because the client and server software components are both doing a lot of computations, a fair amount of power is required.

With SaaS, there is no local installation of software because the vendor manages all the code and the data in their data center. Users access the system through a web browser and its primary role is to present the user interface – not a very computationally intensive function.”

The conclusion, at least based upon the factors Chris chose to measure, is unsurprising;

“That’s an 93% reduction in overall energy consumption for a four physician practice using SaaS EMR software over on-premise software!”

Simon Wardley, one of the Cloud’s more effusive cheerleaders, offers a less straightforward analysis in a recent video conversation with GreenMonk‘s Tom Raftery. It’s well worth watching, although you may join me towards the end in wishing that the fancy fades would stop…

Unsurprisingly, Simon agrees with my opening assertions that compute resources in the Cloud should be more efficiently utilised and therefore cheaper to run on a per-unit basis. However, Simon goes on to suggest that the near-ubiquitous availability of computation will lead to a profligate rise in usage. We might, as Chris Thorman suggested, complete a specific task more cheaply and efficiently than before, but we’ll run more tasks without giving sufficient thought to the consequences. Just as lights and gadgets get left on all over the house because the power is just there (and too cheap to worry about in most cases), so too will ‘available’ computers be squandered. It will be easy to call upon a computer when required, and application developers will be quick to spot the opportunities to put those spare cycles to work in completing myriad small, individually inconsequential yet collectively shockingly wasteful tasks. We see this with desktop computers today, casually devoting once-scarce resources to the generation of  ‘eye candy.’ On an individual basis the ‘waste’ is small and easily ignored. Scaled to the level of the Cloud it will surely become far more noticeable, far more measurable, and far less easy to justify.

Is this the Cloud’s ‘fault?’ No, of course not. Instead it appears baked into the attitudes with which we view commodities. So whilst the technologies behind the Cloud might make Green efficiencies possible, human nature may very well pull in exactly the opposite direction. Which big Cloud provider will be brave enough to implement a ‘Green tax,’ charging customers a premium for ‘wasteful’ computing? And who will decide what’s wasteful, anyway?

And Simon’s final answer to the question, ‘is Cloud Computing Green or not?’

“Yes and No.”

Indeed.

In related news, I’ve been reading the latest installation of Rackspace‘s Green Survey. When directly asked,

“Do you view cloud computing as a greener alternative to traditional computing infrastructures?”

• 21% agreed, “Yes, cloud computing is a much greener alternative”
• 35% were “not convinced of the green benefits of cloud computing”
• 25% reckoned that there was “too much hype around the green benefits of cloud computing”
• 19% suggested that “the true green benefits of cloud cmputing have not yet been realized.”

Asked in a subsequent question about how cloud computing fits within the organisation’s broader set of environmental initiatives, 7% claimed that “cloud computing is critical to our company becoming greener.”

Respondents were all Rackspace customers, and I’m actually surprised that the pro-Green numbers weren’t higher. Did respondents not understand the efficiency argument, did they not believe it, or had they moved past it to embrace Simon’s arguments about our penchant to waste anything abundant?

There are some fascinating figures in the survey, although like many similar exercises I’m left with as many (different) questions as when I started.

So… Are Clouds green?

I think I’ll follow Simon in hedging with ‘Yes and No.’

What do you think?

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Sun Microsystems used the CommunityOne East event in New York City this past March to unveil their Cloud Computing offering. I spoke with the company’s Juan Carlos Soto recently, to learn more.

Today, David Douglas (Senior VP, Cloud Computing) opened CommunityOne West in San Francisco discussing ‘Communities, Open Source Platforms, and Clouds.’ I joined the live webcast to see what he had to say.

Dave Douglas kicks off, talking to the importance of ‘community’. He stresses the underlying value of open – source code, protocols, formats, ideas.

“‘Open’ lowers barriers to adoption and innovation.”

A lot of the ideas he’s highlighting are similar to Tim O’Reilly’s call to ‘do stuff that matters;’ but oddly Dave doesn’t mention this.

Lew Tucker, Sun’s Cloud CTO, gets up on stage to talk about Sun’s Cloud Computing with Dave. Their opening gambit is around the on-demand nature of the Cloud, with its ability to pull up (and shut down) Cloud resources on demand, with a credit card. Lew argues that the Cloud doesn’t create lock-in, as it’s based upon open software such as Apache, Solaris and Linux.

Sun’s Storage Service, announced in March, is still on track to be available this summer… so no surprise unveiling from the stage today.

Lew shows some demonstrations of the Sun Compute and Storage Services, building upon those we saw in March to manage resources in the data centre via GUI.

Dave mentioned that ‘several thousand’ Sun staff currently use the Sun Cloud internally, every day, “in Open Office” and elsewhere. Is this ‘just’ Cloud-based file storage, or something more?

On an intriguing mix of laptops, other examples from Sun Partners include Vertica and webappVM. The examples definitely leaned towards the sysadmin and developer crowd, and I look forward to seeing some user-facing apps down the line. Dave cites ‘dozens and dozens’ of partners, as their logos flash up on screen behind him.

Lew suggests that the Cloud introduces a change from ‘Download -> Install -> Config’ to ‘Deploy,’ with the implication that this will always be easier.

Turning to Security, Lew points to a new ‘secure hardened VM for OpenSolaris,’ available on Amazon S3 today. The Center for Internet Security has assessed this new VM and verified it as secure.

Eric Baldeschwieler from Yahoo! gets up on stage, to talk about the ways in which Apache Hadoop is being used at Yahoo! – and their use of the Sun Cloud.

I look forward to hearing more, face to face, during June’s Semantic Technology and Cloud Computing tour around Silicon Valley; Menlo Park is already on my itinerary, along with sojourns to San Jose, San Francisco and Sunnyvale. Anyone else got things they want to show me, June 14-21?

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Taken together, these announcements shed light on the company’s strategy to strengthen its hold over the data centre, and to offer solutions tailored toward the evolving needs of organisations keen to capitalise upon Cloud Computing’s promise; both inside the private data centre and in interactions with remote resources elsewhere on the network.

I spoke with Wendy Mars, Cisco’s Director for Data Centres and UCS here in Europe, and the result has just been released as a podcast.

We talk about UCS and USD, and explore some of the use cases emerging as beta customers and Cisco itself put these technologies through their paces ahead of a broader roll-out in the coming months.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

In related news, Cisco released a video on YouTube this month in which Wendy responds directly to some of the questions asked about UCS following its announcement, and this is embedded below.

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Virtualisation is clearly an important aspect of Cloud Computing, as is the capability (addressed by VMware’s vCloud Initiative) to easily move from one data centre to another.

Like IBM and others, VMware is pursuing a strategy intended to ease adoption of Cloud Computing principles by those wedded to their existing data centre investments. In the first instance, the company suggests that virtualisation will make existing hardware utilisation far more efficient. In the longer term, though, increasing abstraction of both the physical machines and their location creates opportunities for the local data centre to be compared far more easily to off-premise alternatives.

To understand VMware’s announcements, I recently spoke with the company’s Senior Director of Products and Marketing, Reza Malekzadeh, and the resulting conversation has just been released as a podcast.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

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Long known for their dominance on the desktop, Microsoft is now making a concerted effort to carve out a space of its own in the Cloud with Windows Azure. Amitabh Srivastava, the company’s Corporate Vice President with responsibility for Azure, spoke with me this week and the result has just been released as one of my podcasts.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

Amitabh talks about the company’s aspirations for Azure, and reports on the success of the current ‘Community Technology Preview;’ effectively a beta programme for Azure ahead of its formal launch towards the end of this year. We also discuss the nature of Azure, digging into the question of where Azure will be deployed, and the extent to which it will interact with desktops and data centres beyond Microsoft’s control.

In line with recent announcements from the likes of 3Tera, Amitabh stresses the importance that Microsoft sees in a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Azure.

Have a listen, and see what you think.

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