Agathon Group - "The Good Stuff"

Green clouds

by Peter Green on October 9, 2009 2:21 PM.

No, this isn’t a post about acid rain. It’s a post highlighting a new article by Chris Thorman at Software Advice that talks about all of the environmental benefits that SaaS provides over on-premise hosting. The gist of this well-written article is that SaaS generally provides both tangible and intangible “green” benefits over maintaining “in house” hardware and software.

It’s no stretch to extend this specifically to cloud computing and the green benefits pile up even higher. In addition to the points that Chris highlights, cloud computing has been shown to more effectively utilize server resources, versus traditional hosting. And a more efficient use of server resources leads to lower overall power consumption.

To illustrate this, you might need four physical servers to run your web site: one load balancer, two web servers, and a database server. The power supplies in those four servers might be rated at a total of 2000W. In comparison, running your web application on one of our private clouds could get you the same computing power, only with two servers rated at a total of 1200W. That’s a power savings of 40%… and running your web application on our shared cloud (which is an example of what Chris calls a “multi-tenant architecture”) could help you reduce your carbon footprint even more. Even if the “green” benefits of saving power don’t excite you, saving some “green” on power (the price of which is only ever increasing) ought to at least get you interested!

Saving money and being good stewards of the environment, all while maintaining (if not surpassing) performance and flexibility… it’s clear that cloud computing (and SaaS in general) is a major “green” win.