The Economist nails down, in a special report on corporate IT entitled “Let IT Rise”, the ascertainment of the current inefficiency state of datacenters worldwide. The Economist claims that 7,000 home-grown designed datacenters in North America alone are notoriously known for their inefficiency and, relays McKinsey and the Uptime Institute findings, that on average, only 6% of server capacity is used. Of even more concern is the assumption that nearly 30% of the servers are no longer in use at all in these datacenters, but no one bothers to remove them. It is claimed that often nobody knows which application runs on which server, and so the method used to find out is to “pull the plug and see how calls”(Siegel 2008, p.3). For years, ICT departments kept adding machines when new applications were needed, which over the years led to a situation known as server sprawl. The illustration below shows the worldwide spending of datacenters since 1996 with a projected increase estimated to $250 billion by 2011.
Prior to the economic down-turn of 2009, adding servers was not too much of an issue because entry-level servers were cheap and ever-rising electricity bills were generally charged to the company's facilities budget rather than to the ICT department's budget. But as stated by IDC, this is changing.
Cloud computing as an energy-efficient outsourcing solution deservers some attention. As such, Fleischer and Eibisch (2007) with IDC discuss the business incentives for ICT outsourcing from an increased datacenter efficiency perspective. They report that in 2007 around 50% of companies were still hosting their Web sites and e-business infrastructure internally and that this trend has been consistent over recent years. However, they believe that many companies that do in-house hosting are underestimating the total costs involved in doing so, due mainly to the rising costs of power and cooling and the gradual shift of costs such as power from facilities departments to ICT organizations. This claim is substantiated by a survey conducted by IDC in 2006 showing that 13% of companies' total datacenter operational expenditure went on electricity and that respondents expected that proportion to increase to 20% within a year.
In times of cost-cutting, where companies are striving to reduce fixed costs not directly related to their core businesses, the concern of datacenter inefficiency becomes more stringent. For this reason, IDC believes that many datacenters will be modernized and consolidated, but the cost of modernizing and refitting existing facilities is extremely high and will have a major impact on overall ICT budgets that is beyond the reach of many organizations, including primarily SMBs. Because of that, many enterprises will need to consider fitting-out new datacenter facilities in the near future. A new and more efficient datacenter that consumes less power is a greener datacenter and even more so if further consideration is given to sourcing renewable power, geographical location or reuse of the generated heat, as examples. Considering the source of power generation is also very important as it is possible to reduce a datacenter's power consumption, while still seeing an increase in carbon footprint, if the power source is switched from, say, nuclear to coal.
Numerous studies, including the one conducted by Greenspace46, an Illinois-based vendor of green building supplies, support the claim that cloud customers can save billions of kW-hours in energy consumption, and so, foster the idea that cloud computing is greener than traditional datacenters because providers are able to squeeze the performance and efficiency of their infrastructures at much higher levels of compute resource utilization than individual companies, especially small firms with fewer ICT resources. But whether Cloud Computing is a green technology or not is a totally different question, as you will read in the next post.
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