What's so green about the cloud?

A very pleasant surprise last week Thursday as I took my turn on Mike Buck's Tech Buzz talk show on Clearchannel radio, the very first caller commented on how green the new Islanda Cloud Computing services are for Hawaii. For people who are not familiar with the full implications of cloud computing this may not be immediately apparent. So here is the Green part of the cloud.

The percentage of US electrical power used by servers doubled between 2000 and 2005 based on the first study of this done in 2007. When power use for related equipment and cooling was added in servers were responsible for 1.6% of US electrical utilization in 2005. Most of that growth was in the lower end of servers due to the steady growth in numbers of that type of server. That level of utilization equaled the electricity used by televisions in the US that year. We are now four years later and the numbers have probably grown.

The average server such as standard Dell office server uses about 200 watts per year based on a comparison of power utilization for a Microsoft Server 2008 with improved power management. Newer servers use less power and well managed data centers closely monitor power utilization as this becomes very significant if you have 1,000 servers installed. Based on last years mainland electrical costs (much lower than Hawaii's costs) a single server would only cost about $160 per year and an ordinary workstation (PC) about $49 per year. As with most things affecting climate the individual numbers are small but the totals add up very quickly. With 2,000 of those servers in use we have $1.3 million in energy costs. How can the cloud make this better?

Because Islanda Cloud Services are based on virtualization we can significantly reduce the number of servers in operation delivering the same information and transactional power. The first drive to virtualization has been in enterprise data centers with hundreds of servers. The standard file/application server (dependent on the specific nature of the processes it is running) normally runs at about 20% of it's capacity. Virtualization allows the creation of four virtual servers on one physical server (again this can vary significantly depending on the intensity of the Input/Output that the server is handling). The goal with virtualization is to move the utilization to about 80% on average. No matter how you cut it that is a very large savings. But there's more!

For all office a major cost of business is the IT infrastructure including everyones' PC. One of the biggest problem for small businesses is supporint upgrades to Operating Systems like Microsoft Vista which requires a much more powerful computer than Windows XP. Windows 7 is not going to change that later this year. But with Cloud Workstations (virtual desktops) almost all the processing power is in our data center on our virtualized servers. We can upgrade almost any old PC to be a state of the art Vista/Windows 7 system because your office or home PC becomes just a client and only handles screen presentation of the data along with network connectivity. Storage of data with very high security and processing happens in a controlled and fully managed data center. Very simply this means you can keep the old simplere PCs longer and there are fewer of them going to the landfills every year. Did you ever wonder how many old PCs are piling up in warehouses, garages, store rooms and offices. While as standalone PCs these have no future due to changes in processing requirements and security systems as "thin clients" they can go back to work very easily and last for a much longer time. This is good. It is also green.

The key to how green cloud services can be is the total focus on effeciency and careful management. The side benefits are reduced costs, improved information processing, reduced staff loads leading to much higher productivity. That makes the bottom line green also.

The Basic Debate on Cloud Computing

As we at Islanda have launched Islanda Cloud Services for Hawaii it was necessary to come down on one side of the ongoing debate about the definition of cloud computing. While everything in the world of IT seems to be driven by the current buzzword that no one can really define there are times when the buzzword develops from reality rather than fantasy. To me the simplest rule is to determine whether the buzzword is hoping to create some "buzz" about someones' idea for business processing or technology or whether something that was developing for several years but no one knew quite what to call it simply found a name.

Cloud computing is a combination of technologies that have finally found a name after having been proven to deliver greatly improved efficiency and a clear value for delivery of IT services to end users. The technologies that evolved from virtualization follow a standard technology model of attempting to solve a resource problem, poor utilization of hardware technology that also difficult to scale, and end up delivering a conceptual transformation to how you manage Information Technology. It's worked for enterprise IT departments and web services via Google and Amazon and now it is beginning to work for the last great IT frontier; small and medium sized businesses. That has always been my goal and we now have the tools (with a good name) that can do this.

But the real debate about cloud computing now stems from the tendency of IT companies to try to stick the name on everything and gain a competitive edge. Dell, HP and some other large enterprise providers are using the name "cloud" to describe virtualized data centers in the enterprise. There is a good bit of truth to the rants of Larry Ellison and others that cloud computing used in this context is little more than a marketing ploy with no meaning. Those arguments tend to miss the point about this type of technological transformation but they do identify that nothing much is really changing except the technology being used managed the infrastructure.

The other definition, which is the foundation for Islanda Cloud Services, is transformational as it allows a service level delivery of IT resources to a large group of businesses and organizations that don't know what a data center actually is. IBM has come down on this side with their new cloud division. This transformation allows Islanda and other providers on the mainland to begin delivering fully managed and scalable servers and virtual desktops with enterprise level security and policy implementation to offices as small as four or five people with a clumsy shared file system. We will evolve this to on-demand storage and processing power that can make significant economic differences to small entrepreneurial companies just beginning to exploit information based services as well as traditional small businesses who must become fully digitized and flexible enough to survey a major economic meltdown. I think that is the true meaning of "cloud computing" and that is the meaning we will work to expand and make practical for small businesses in Hawaii.