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Colic V., Colic S., Ognjenovic V., The Impact of Cloud Computing Implementation On A Company's Eco Policy
Colic V., Colic S., Ognjenovic V., The Impact of Cloud Computing Implementation On A Company's Eco Policy
INTRODUCTION
Being one of the newest trends in the world of information technology, cloud computing gives rise to
the following strives, present in almost every aspect of todays life: to be cheaper, faster and greener.
In order to be more competitive and therefore successful in any aspect of modern life, one needs to do
things at a lower cost, greater speed compared to the others and with the least possible negative impact
on the environment. This is the reason why cloud computing is being rapidly implemented in
companies across the globe.
However, as [7] state, the growing demand of Cloud infrastructure has drastically increased the energy
consumption of data centres, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption both
reduces the profit margin of Cloud providers and leads to high carbon emissions, which is completely
opposite to green.
Hence, this negative impact needs to be minimized through energy-efficient solutions. These solutions
can be designed only after a deep analysis of Cloud, with respect to their power efficiency.
MATERIAL AND METHODS
Company Cloud Benefits
Business people are becoming more and more aware of the amount of energy IT systems consume and
their environmental impact nowadays. This is the reason why the business world is increasingly seeing
the implementation of a greener solution - Cloud computing. The idea behind this notion is storing
data not locally, but on an external, outsourced server. This practically means that the need for bulky
hardware and expensive software does not exist anymore. The advantages are numerous for an
organization environmental footprint of using cloud computing, as compared to having an internal IT
system, can be reduced by up to 90%; moreover, it leads to the elimination of hardware obtaining,
administering and maintaining, which provides great cost reduction. Apart from that, the problem of
space lack and cooling is avoided in this way. Technology efficiency is greater in Clouds than in
traditional data centers due to idle time optimization.
Cloud service providers need to keep their cost low. Therefore they need to ensure there is no energy
waste through focusing on performance. In fact, as [5] states, they provide maximum of services with
the least resources (including energy), which in the final instance is the basis of being green.
III International Conference Industrial Engineering And Environmental Protection 2013 (IIZS 2013)
October 30th, 2013, Zrenjanin, Serbia
__________________________________________________________________________________________
When comparing Cloud computing to in-house data centers, one can see that utilization rates in shared
data centers can be, most frequently, around 60 to 70%, while at the same time they amount only 5 to
10% in most corporations. Therefore, the shared resources and energy costs lead to maximum cost
reduction through increased energy efficiency. On the other hand, with in-house data centers,
companies may not be able to afford to keep upgrading to energy-efficient equipment, lacking space
and finances. Anyway, they will often be forced to purchase more machines than necessary in order to
handle peak data loads. In Cloud computing option, these resources can be allocated dynamically
where needed.
Cloud and Environmental Sustainability
As it could be seen from the previous chapter, the notion of Cloud computing evokes the thoughts of
sustainability, greenness, and significant energy savings. Indeed, one of the main driver technologies
for energy efficient Clouds is virtualization, which allows significant improvement in Cloud energy
efficiency by leveraging the economies of scale associated with large number of organizations sharing
the same infrastructue. In this way, companies can gain high savings in the form of space,
management, and energy.
On the other hand, commercialization of thousands of simultaneous e-commerce transactions and
millions of Web queries a day, today known as Cloud computing, brought to an alarming rise in
internet usage during the last decade. Architecturally, this trend is supported through large-scale
datacentres, which consolidate thousands of servers with cooling, strorage infrastructure and network
systems. The basic idea behind it is that the data in use are not stored locally, i.e. on hard drive of
individual user, but on a remotely located server owned by so-called cloud vendor. In fact, most
Internet users nowadays already use cloud computing, being completely unaware of that fact (e.g.
web-based e-mail). This is the reason why, at a first glance, Cloud computing looks green.
However, when transferred to the business field, its implications on both companys profit and
environment still need to be questioned. Traditionally, companies needed to invest great deal of capital
and time in acquisition and maintenance of IT resources. Cloud computing shifts this approach from
owning to subscribing, by providing access to scalable infrastructure and services on-demand.
Therefore, the issue of purchasing, configuring, administering and maintaining own computer
infrastructure is no longer present now users can store, access, and share any amount of information
on cloud, which the vendor is resposible for. Thus, the companies can focus on their core
competencies, while the vendors provide all the necessary services to maintain the infrastucture
working.
Not so Green a Cloud
As already stated, providing Cloud services to companies significantly reduces client companys costs
regarding manipulation of own IT resources. However, a question needs to be posed: is Cloud
introduction a real solution or the problem is merely being shifted from the core to the outsourcing
company?
In fact, while on one hand this significantly reduces company-purchasers cost, on the other, it
increases the carbon emission to a critical level (Figure 1). Therefore, various elements of Clouds
which contribute to the total energy consumption need to be revised, as well as the more efficient
solutions to be provided in order to make Cloud which is factually green.
III International Conference Industrial Engineering And Environmental Protection 2013 (IIZS 2013)
October 30th, 2013, Zrenjanin, Serbia
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Source: Bianchini, R., Rajamony, R., Power and Energy Management for Server Systems, Computer, Vol.37, No. 11, pp.
68-74, 2004.
III International Conference Industrial Engineering And Environmental Protection 2013 (IIZS 2013)
October 30th, 2013, Zrenjanin, Serbia
__________________________________________________________________________________________
efficiency of each Cloud provider, stimulating them to make their service green at the same time
(Figure 2).
Saurabh, K. G., Rajkumar, B., Green Cloud Computing and Environmental Sustainability, p.20, 2011.
III International Conference Industrial Engineering And Environmental Protection 2013 (IIZS 2013)
October 30th, 2013, Zrenjanin, Serbia
__________________________________________________________________________________________
simultaneous requests from multiple customers, these servers need to be powerful and therefore they
consume a great deal of energy. This all can be tracked in the sense of its carbon footprint, which is
actually the first step towards making Cloud technology greener. The following step is, as proposed, to
introduce the middle tier, which role would be to manage the customers requests towards Cloud
providers, with regard to greenness. Specifically, this means that, having information on current use of
cloud providers resources, the middle tier decides which server to send the users request to,
according to the usage. The server which is less used at the moment will be assigned for the task and
therefore, less electric power shall be used. In the final instance, the carbon footprint of the cloud will
be reduced, which is the main goal.
The future research direction should be in the sense of the middle tier request directing speed, since at
this point a problem is likely to occur the final users requests need to be solved, obeying the green
policy at the same time. After addressing this issue, the following period make Cloud have a factually
positive impact on companies eco policy.
REFERENCES
[1] Abdelsalam, H., Maly, K., Mukkamala, R., Zubair, M., Kaminsky, D., Towards Energy
Efficient Change Management in a Cloud Computing Environment, Proceedings of 3rd
International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security, The
Netherlands, 2009.
[2] Accenture Microsoft Report. 2010. Cloud computing and Sustainability: The
Environmental Benefits of Moving to the Cloud, retrieved from
http://www.wspenvironmental.com/media
/docs/newsroom/Cloud_computing_and_Sustainability_-_Whitepaper_-_Nov_2010.pdf
on 5/10/2013
[3] Bianchini, R., Rajamony, R., Power and Energy Management for Server Systems,
Computer, Vol.37, No. 11, pp. 68-74, 2004.
[4] Cloud Computing: The Latest in Tech Also Has Hidden Environmental Benefits,
retrieved from http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/info_tech/hiddenenvironmental-benefits-cloud-computing on 03/10/2013
[5] Greenpeace International, Make IT Green, retrieved from http://www.greenpeace.org/
international/en/publications/reports/make-it-green-Cloudcomputing on 6/10/2013
[6] Rick Blaisdell, Why is Cloud Computing Green?, retrieved from
http://www.rickscloud.com/why-is-cloud-computing-green/ on 4/10/2013
[7] Rivoire, S., Shah, M. A., Ranganathan, P., Kozyrakis, C., Joulesort: a Balanced
Energy-Efficiency Benchmark, Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD International
Conference on Management of Data, NY, USA, 2007.
[8] Saurabh, K. G., Rajkumar, B., Green Cloud Computing and Environmental
Sustainability, Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University
of Melbourne, Australia, 2011.
[9] Srikantaiah, S., Kansal, A., Zhao, F. 2008. Energy aware consolidation for Cloud
computing. Proceedings of HotPower 08 Workshop on Power Aware computing and
Systems, San Diego, CA, USA, 2008.