The data explosion racing around the internet as people do more online banking, shopping and thousands of other things requires energy-hungry data centers to process and store the growing volumes of information. These data centers need lots of electricity to power and cool servers, but IBM researchers have developed technology that can redistribute workloads to lower-powered or underutilized systems, thus saving energy and reducing the environmental footprint associated with cloud computing services.
“Lots of companies are providing cloud services and we want to enable users to specify a balance between getting tasks done and the environmental impact [associated with using the cloud]. Right now people don’t have a way of telling cloud providers they want environmentally-friendly cloud services,” Keith Walker, Master Inventor and co-creator of the technology told Breaking Energy during a recent interview.
Read more Breaking Energy coverage of data center power demand: “The Fracked Internet: Data Centers Could Emerge on Gas Fields”
It works by routing all requests to the most-environmentally friendly devices, including the servers, air conditioning, and everything going into a data center, said Walker. The technology maps the entire data center and assigns environmental ratings to each component. A customer specifies how “green” they want their interaction with the cloud to be and the technology sends the data through the system based on the customer’s request.
“With this approach, a cloud will be tuned to automatically route service requests through network devices, systems and software that process the service while consuming the least amount of electricity,” IBM said in a statement. “The patented cloud computing technique is similar to how energy companies dynamically price and serve energy according to the type of energy a customer needs, how much is required, when it is needed, etc.”
The environmental rating accounts for how electricity in a given region is generated – coal, natural gas, wind, etc. – and can even consider the amount of water used to cool the generating plants dispatching power to that data center.
“Power is probably the biggest factor, but not only one,” Walker said. “Customers can go as granular as they want.”
The technology remains at an early stage, having just been patented October 1st, but Walker sees few barriers for adoption. “All companies have information about their devices, so this just adds a field for environmental rating,” he said.
“It’s like purchasing a computer – you have the choice of buying a high speed hard drive, but do you need it for what you actually plan to do with the computer? Would something less powerful, but more energy efficient, meet your needs? Certain cloud services, or tasks within a service, don’t need a great deal of power, or can be done during off-peak hours,” Walker explains in a blog post.
