Green Peace is no stranger to controversy, and in this case their recently published study on Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change has certainly caused a lot of discussion on the inter webs.
The documents thesis is that we are building huge numbers of data centers and that we need to consider the impact of them, and also that we need to ensure we use renewable energy to power cloud based infrastructure.
Again, as usual with Green Peace, in general it’s hard to disagree with the overall argument that the planet is important, it’s the way they choose to deliver their messages, and the way they target them that I find issue with.
The document wants to attack the corporate “boogey man out to kill mother nature”, which is embodied by this quote: “But decisions about how the cloud will be built out are being made by business leaders primarily concerned with quarterly profit statements and earnings for shareholders.”
The first point I’d like to make is, data centers and computing resources are cost centers from a business perspective, the more efficiently and the less resources we can use to deliver IT, the better the profit statements and earnings for shareholders will be. So to say that business and being green are mutually exclusive would be naive and as usual irks me.
Secondly, Green Peace is totally missing the boat on what Cloud is. Cloud infrastructure would be the equivalent of public transit for the IT world. The fact that the stack can be scaled dynamically up and down and that many organizations/deptartments/stakeholders can share the same common infrastructure means far less wasteage in the form of dedicated hardware stacks for app silos that sit idle.
Thirdly, the world of IT has driven up productivity, increased the worldwide standard of living, enabled Green Peace and many other organizations to disseminate their message without using paper products, and due to supply chain enhancement has increased the efficiency of delivering goods on demand to consumers (thus reducing waste).
The paper totally misses the most important point, which is the fact that the number one waster of energy in IT is overcapacity or sprawl. Regardless of whether we use renewable sources or not to power our data centers, the fact of the matter is that IT is nessecary for the progress of society, what is un-necessary and needless is the provisioning of unneeded hardware or sprawl in improperly sized environments.
Luckily there are monitoring solutions out there that can help with this key challenge. Whatever hardware/virtual/cloud, software or device stack you are using, make sure your monitoring platform allows you to determine whether you have too many “heaters in the data center”, “whether you can save on space”, “save on cooling” and all those other things Green Peace should love you for.
P.S: If you are interested in Green Peace’s original study, click here.
Tags: cloud, Cloud Monitoring, green IT
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