A summary of James Glanz's NYT article on the environmental footprint of cloud computing.

1. Cloud computing is...

2. ...a huge phenomenon
• More than 3 million data centers of widely
varying sizes worldwide (IDC)
• US government datacentres - up from 432
in 1998 to 2,094 in 2010

3. ... driven by
• Massive expansion in data
• 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information
created globally last year
• 75% of that generated by individuals, not
corporations
• But corporate use also huge -- e.g. NYSE
generates 2,000 GB/day, which has to be
stored for years

4. ... power-hungry
• In US, cloud computing used 76 billion
kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2010
• That’s ~ 2 percent of all electricity used in
the US that year (Jonathan Koomey,
Stanford)
• Compare with paper industry, which took
67 billion kilowatt-hours from the grid in
2010

5. (just for comparison)
• One data-centre = one medium-sized town
• Google consumes 300 megawatts (MW)
• Facebook 60m MW

6. ... very inefficient
• Typically data-centres only use 6-12% of
energy for actual computation
• In one sample of 333 servers monitored
in 2010, >50% were found to be
comatose (i.e. not doing any
computation)
• Nearly 75% of servers in the sample
were using less than 10 percent of their
computational power

7. ... wasteful
• Low utilization rates mean that the energy
wasted is as much as 30 times the amount
of electricity used to carry out the basic
purpose of the data centre
• Most of the energy goes on keeping idle
machines running, and cooling them down

8. ... polluting
• Data-centres use (diesel generators for
backup
• These often violate air pollution regulations
• (~ 12 data-centres in Virginia and Illinois
fined in one year)

9. ... badly managed
• Most run at max capacity 24x7x365
• (because of fear of downtime)
• Waste 90% of the energy they pull off the
grid

10. ... in a word, nuts
• On both financial and environmental
grounds.

11. Based on James Glanz’s NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html

12. John Naughton
memex.naughtons.org