Senin, 18 Juni 2012

Google's Cloud Is a Lot Greener Than Yours


Energy efficiency and a general "green" attitude have long been Google's strong points. The company made it a goal of having the cleanest and the most efficient data centers out there and for the most part has succeeded. It can afford to, both because it's making a huge amount of money and because it can apply the economy of scale.

Google uses up a lot of energy to power the hundreds of thousands of servers it has, so it can afford to invest in the most efficient cooling systems and in green energy production, solar, wind farms and so on.

One good thing about the Google cloud is that it's available to everyone, for a price. Regular users just have to make do with the ads, but enterprise users have to pay for Google Apps.

Still, the switch to the cloud can lead to quite significant savings compared to using an on-site solution. For one, of course, companies don't have to pay for servers, people to run them, cooling solutions, backup solutions, backup energy and so on and so forth.

But they also save on power bills, quite a lot. Best of all, the savings are not just transfered to Google since the company servers are a lot more efficient than any enterprise, even huge ones, can hope to.

"Last year, we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to 80 times more energy-efficient than running traditional in-house email," Google's Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president for technical infrastructure, wrote.

"We’ve sharpened our pencils again to see how Google Apps as a whole—documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications—stacks up against the standard model of locally hosted services. Our results show that a typical organization can achieve energy savings of about 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps," he said.

"The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which recently switched its 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government, ... was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%. That means the GSA will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs alone, a 93% cost reduction," he added.

Via: Google's Cloud Is a Lot Greener Than Yours

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