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Energy efficiency in the cloud
6/18/12
At Google, we’re obsessed with building
energy efficient data centers
that enable
cloud computing
. Besides helping you be more
productive
, cloud-based services like
Google Apps
can reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions and save you money in the process. Last year,
we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to
80 times more energy-efficient
than running traditional in-house email. 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.
Lower energy use results in less carbon pollution and more energy saved for organizations. That’s what happened at the
U.S. General Services Administration
(GSA), which recently switched its approximately 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government. We found that the GSA 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.
How is the cloud so energy efficient? It’s all about reducing energy use for servers and server cooling. Here’s how it works:
A typical organization has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilized. And our data centers use equipment and software specially designed to
minimize energy use
. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.
In fact, according to a
study
by the Carbon Disclosure Project, by migrating to the cloud, companies with over $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe could achieve substantial reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions by 2020:
US companies
could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2
UK companies
would save
£1
.2 billion and more than 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
French companies
could save nearly
€700
million and 1.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
We’ve built efficient data centers all over the world, even designing them in ways that make the
best use of the natural environment
, and we continue working to improve their performance. We think using the super-efficient cloud to deliver services like Google Apps can be part of the solution towards a more energy efficient future.
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure
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