Google data centers search virtually all the world’s online information for a billion users while using just 0.01 percent of global energy.
Cloud Computing Can Use Energy Efficiently
September 24, 2012
Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Urs Hölzle.
Google’s servers refresh 20 billion pages a day, process over 100 billion search queries a month, provide email for 425 million Gmail users and process 72 hours of video uploaded per minute to YouTube. And yet we’re able to do all that work with relatively little energy, compared to other industries.
Data centers are responsible for between 1.1 and 1.5 percent of global energy use (compare that to transportation at 25 percent), and Google’s data centers are less than a percent of that. It’s a testament to the almost unimaginable improvements in computing power per watt that Moore’s Law has brought us over the past decades. Searching virtually all the world’s online information for a billion users with just 0.01 percent of global energy use illustrates how much less energy it takes to move electrons (information) than atoms (physical things)…
Because of our obsession with efficiency, we’re able to help others be more efficient as well. Small and medium data centers use two-thirds of the total energy because it’s much harder to run them efficiently, so the trend of replacing on-premise servers with efficient cloud services will reduce the amount of energy used to run the same workload. For example, the U.S. General Services Administration, recently switched its approximately 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government and was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90 percent and carbon emissions by 85 percent. By moving to cloud services, that agency will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs. According to a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project, cloud computing can help companies realize $12.3 billion in energy savings and 85.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide savings annually by 2020…
Read more from the source @ http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/23/informations-environmental-cost/cloud-computing-can-use-energy-efficiently