Inquisitive

Does moving to cloud reduces your carbon footprint?

Here comes another case for moving to the cloud. This time it is not financial or business efficiency but a social imperative.. Yes, it is sustainability. 

A joint white paper by Microsoft, Accenture and WSP informs that the traditional advantages of cloud also translates to environmental benefits too. The attributes that cloud service providers tend to do better are :

• Dynamic Provisioning
• Multi-tenancy
• Higher Infrastructure Utilization
• Improved Data center PUE
• Better Hardware lifecycle management 
• Tailored hardware
• Efficient application codes & configurations

 

 

Another interesting find is about relationship between server utilization & power consumption. The figure shows that by increasing utilization from 5 to 20% gives 4 fold performance increase while the power increases by 10 to 20%. So this performance gain can be enjoyed by anybody operating their servers at this utilization range but the paper assumes that cloud service providers will have a better chance of operating most of the servers at this range.

Overall the paper is excellent when it comes to Service provider clouds. It uses three main Microsoft enterprise apps - Sharepoint, Exchange and Dynamics running on Microsoft cloud and on-premise as examples. You can download the paper here.

But the question is whether private clouds gives you the same environmental benefit? It may not because private cloud is operated in a different way than public cloud service providers. Let's wait & watch for a similar study from private cloud technology provider. Now there is another reason to move to cloud & that is good for our planet too.. 

Data Center on Wheels from Microsoft

A cool data center concept by Microsoft

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision">Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision</a>

Will Indian IT hotshots make rain from the ‘cloud’?

Cloud computing is the IT buzzword of the moment. I am not going to try explaining what ‘cloud’ is all about here. There are many great resources on the web explaining cloud. You can find one here, here and here

 

For many cloud computing seems like a marketing bandwagon onto which all the vendors have jumped into and there is a lot of hype around it. Despite the hype there are lot of good reasons on why not to dismiss the trend as cloud promises a sea change to the way IT will be consumed in the coming years.

 

Traditionally IT is something that companies buy and put it in their data center. But Cloud promises to deliver the same over a wire. This fundamental change implies a great deal to the Indian IT service providers. It is going to be a highly disruptive and above all it’s a huge opportunity.

 

The obvious opportunities for the Indian IT vendors are:

 

• A massive product & technology engineering opportunity as all key vendors are re-engineering their relevant product lines to be consumed in the cloud
• Building branded cloud services
• Building enabling components for companies that want to be in cloud business
• Providing consultancy to help businesses on how they want to exploit the cloud

 One group that already got kick start is the Tata Sons. EKA, the only supercomputer among top ten in the world available for commercial use will be put for cloud computing research in partnership with Yahoo. As per the plan, EKA will be running the yahoo customized hadoop. The result out of this partnership will give a huge push for TCS in this space.

 

Let’s wait and watch on whom cloud rains first...