Green Cloud Computing and Energy Saving

Few can doubt that global warming and climate change presents each of us with an overarching concern for the future. However, many fail to recognize the extraordinary impact that the Information and Communications Technologies ecology has on the global demand for resources, primarily from the usage of electrical energy. Within this ecology, data centers have emerged as the area of high usage, and therefore present a prime opportunity for energy savings. Data center usage appears to be accelerating with the advent of entirely new and massive environments such as Meta. These emerging circumstances only increase the need to focus on advancing energy savings in data centers. No single method of reducing energy consumption will be sufficient to resolve these needs. Rather, a host of techniques must be brought to bear on this issue. Among the options are load balancing (distribution of a set of tasks over a set of resources), service migration (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and CaaS), hardware efficiency (e.g., automated sleeping mode), software optimization through migration (e.g., SQL to SQL Lite), heterogeneous scheduling (schedulers that optimize available hardware resources) and other similar techniques. HEROS has been demonstrated to be a highly effective means of load balancing. Engineers face certain challenges when implementing these efficiencies. Most notably, engineers must address security and operational stability. Public storage allows opportunity to those seeking unauthorized access. Even non-public environments run the risk of attack by those seeking to acquire or destroy data. As a counterbalance to this, the concentration of data in a singular facility provides the opportunity to install protections that may well be cost prohibitive or unavailable in smaller, local sites. The effectiveness of all cloud-based services relies on access through the internet. Any disruption in this access poses severe hardship on those reliant upon the system. These risks can be mitigated by redundancy in accesses to internet and the provision of local servers that use as a cache during non-operational periods of the cloud-based solutions. Ultimately, the success of any efficiency program depends upon more than the mere availability of solution. Users must realize the personal benefits associated with the implementation of these solutions. The ever-increasing costs of energy and the impact of energy shortages ought to create requisite incentive to see the usage of these efficiency programs.