Green Cloud Computing — A Better Way to Use the Cloud

There has been a significant increase in energy utilization due to the growing need for cloud computing infrastructure. The power demand is a substantial contribution to the rise in the carbon footprint of the environment.

It is not strange why there is an increasing power demand, especially when there’s an exponential growth of big data centers in companies having thousands of infrastructures, including servers and many more.

Hence, it becomes necessary to find solutions that are energy efficient to reduce the effect of cloud computing. There’s a potential solution to decrease energy consumption. It is known as Green Cloud Computing or Green Information Technology.

It involves studying digital devices’ design, production, and utilization to reduce their effect on the environment. Apart from using these solutions to reduce energy consumption, you also cut down operational costs.

Green Computing, also known as Green IT, is about making efficient use of available cloud computing resources.

Green Computing is “Where organizations adopt a policy of ensuring that the setup and operations of Information Technology produce the minimal carbon footprint.”

Green Cloud is “the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems.

Cloud computing is used by Technology or IT Services companies to deliver computing requirements as a service to a heterogeneous community of end-recipients.

• It is a Virtualized Computing Platform.
• Scalable use of computing resources.
• Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. It enables the hosting of applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting cloud computing applications consume vast amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment.

Cloud Service Models

1. Software as a Service: The software is present on clouds, and all type processing is done on the cloud only. This feature allows users to access the software from any computer which is connected to the internet.
2. Storage as a Service: This service allows users to outsource their data storage needs to the cloud. The user stores all his/her files on the cloud, but all kinds of processing is done on the User’s PC.
3. Processing as a Service: This model provides users the functionality to process complex computation on the cloud, consisting of powerful servers. Tasks that demand less processing power are carried on the user’s PC only.

Green Cloud computing is used to achieve efficient processing and utilization of computing infrastructure and minimize energy consumption.

It is also called GREEN IT.

Green Cloud computing is envisioned to achieve efficient processing and utilization of computing infrastructure and minimize energy consumption. This is essential for ensuring that the future growth of Cloud computing is sustainable.

Otherwise, Cloud computing with increasingly pervasive front-end client devices interacting with back-end data centers will cause an enormous escalation of energy usage.

Study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using and disposing of computing resources with minimal environmental damage.

Goals Of Green Cloud Computing:

• Reduce the use of hazardous material; it causes harm to the environment.
• “Green” Data Centers.
• Using recycled materials.
• Supply Chain Energy Usage.
• Green Cloud Computing Architecture

Green Cloud is a sophisticated packet-level simulator for energy-aware cloud computing data centers with a focus on cloud communications. It offers detailed, fine-grained modeling of the energy consumed by the data center IT equipment, such as computing servers, network switches, and communication links.

Green Cloud can be used to develop novel solutions in monitoring, resource allocation, workload scheduling, and optimization of communication protocols and network infrastructures. It is released under the General Public License Agreement and is an extension of the well-known NS2 network simulator.

Benefits of Going Green

What makes Green Cloud Computing so important? What’s the difference between standard Cloud Computing?

Green Cloud Computing offers a solution that ensures that the user enjoys all the benefits of cloud storage and still minimizes all adverse impacts. Green Cloud Computing’s primary goal is to decrease massive data centers such as Azure, Google, Amazon, eBay, etc.

It focuses on adopting environmentally sustainable production practices, better waste and recycling procedures, and energy-efficient technology.

Green Design: it has to do with designing energy-efficient computers, infrastructure, software applications, servers, and other digital devices to minimize energy consumption.

Green Production: reducing energy usage and waste by repurposing and recycling devices that can be useful for digital device production. It helps contribute to better environmental sustainability.

Green Usage: minimizing the amount of energy consumed by a device when in use has the potential of saving up to 27% of the energy formerly used.

Apart from decreasing the waste generated by large data centers and large corporations, the average computer owner can also adopt green practices into their data usage.

• Switching to sleep mode whenever you’re away from your PC for an extended length of time
• Shut down your computers at the end of each day.
• Try refurbishing your digital devices rather than purchasing new appliances.
• Recycle digital waste products

Strategies to go Green while using the Cloud

Three strategies can revolutionize the usage of cloud computing and also go green:

Nano Data Centers: to make cloud computing green, a computing platform is newly developed to use internet service providers. These computing platforms control home gateways to provide storage and computing services. Compared to the traditional data centers, Nano Data Centers are much more energy efficient. They assist in minimizing the impact of heat dissipation. They have the capacity for self scalability or self-adaptation and also possess high service proximity.

Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling: this is a technique that decreases the energy and power consumption processes applied in frequency scaling. The implementation of this method will minimize energy usage and leverage resources utilization.

Virtualization: here is an effective strategy to improve energy efficiency and machine management by sharing one physical instance of an application/resource with several organizations or customers at the moment in time.

Virtualization is a technique to maximize the number of available system resources in an environmentally friendly way. It improves the management and monitoring of resource allocation. Virtualization helps in maximizing the ability of the server group to share resources.

Going Green is not something new to the public; however, it might seem new to cloud computing. People are very much aware of the carbon footprint all over the world, especially now than ever. Minimizing energy consumption cannot be taken with levity.

You can trace back the roots of these concepts to as far back as 1992 when the US Environmental Protection Agency started a program to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. It was called Energy Star. The goal of the program is to specify and promote products that observed energy-efficient guidelines.

Computers were the first products that were tagged with Energy Star. It was this program that brought about the implementation of the sleep mode feature in digital devices. This feature is still useful today in managing energy even though it was developed about 30 years ago.

Final Thoughts

Cloud Computing has substantially impacted millions of businesses, especially being a highly effective infrastructure. Although the increasing demand in power to sustain the infrastructures is quite demanding, expensive, and can hurt the environment. Hence, the need for Green cloud computing and an energy-efficient solution for minimizing the carbon footprint and achieving a greener environment. It is effective and efficient.