Deepa Damaodaran

BANGALORE, INDIA: Whenever I hear or read about Green data centres, the first thing that crosses my mind is a data centre coloured in green.

Ok, now that was a bit off the mark from the topic I wanted to write about. At a juncture where environmentalists are crying hoarse and dry over the rising green house gas (GHG) emissions, a green data centre would be the apt solution for this rising woe. Especially when today the world marks the 40th anniversary of the World Earth Day.

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However, when we talk about how to make data centres green, all we get to read is how to bring down the temperature inside data centres, or how to arrange server racks such that they don't consume more electricity, or how to keep data centres cool and the like.

We miss a very important point in terms of greening a data centre – electricity, that is being used to run these huge server farms, or else in the modern day jargon, the Cloud. From where do these cloud or data centres get their supply of electricity?

Facebook made big news when it announced a data centre of its own, a 147,000-square-foot server farm in Prineville, USA, in January 2010. It also listed out several greening mechanisms to be used in its data centre.

It seems all fine and green till here until PacifiCorp, a subsidiary Pacific Power, comes into the picture. Facebook contracted PacifiCorp to supply energy for the data centre and it is well known that PacifiCorp runs data centre on coal, it being one of the cheapest natural resources, if not the most abundant.

This is not a new phenomena in the US, on the whole, coal-fired power stations account for about 60 percent of the US' electricity generation and are also the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike Facebook, or Google or for that matter Apple, who chose coal over renewable sources of energy to run data centres, Yahoo chose to build a data centre, outside Buffalo, New York, that is powered by energy from a hydroelectric power plant.

Now, that is smart, 'green move', but how many will follow the suite? Going forward, the situation is going to be even worse, with the proliferation of smart devices, who will be talking and accessing Internet over the metro.

Year 2010, touted to be the ‘Year of the Cloud’, has seen and will see more hostings than never before. Moving over to the cloud seems to be the latest mantra, in this Cloud-pecked era.

Arrival of iPad, growth in netbooks and other tablet computers, launch of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services for business, and the launch of the Google phone and the proliferation of mobile cloud applications are compelling signs of a movement towards cloud-based computing within the business sector and public consciousness in a way never seen before.

Today, everybody wants to be on the cloud and have a server farm of their own. However, it needs to be green as well.

Greening data centres should not be mere economy driven, but environmentally driven as well, says Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organization, who released its latest report, 'Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change'.

“Economy should not be the overpowering notion behind a company's strategy to adopt Green in data centres. Environment factors should also be considered before going for 'cheap', and 'nonrenewable' sources of energy for data centres,” notes Greenpeace in its report.

Unless cloud data centres are strategically placed to utilise or be co-developed with renewable sources of electricity, the data centre operators are stuck with the same problem everybody has, and having to accept the mix of clean and dirty energy sources that the electric utilities rely upon to feed the grid, adds the report.

“Ultimately, if cloud providers want to provide a truly green and renewable cloud, they must use their power and influence to not only drive investments near renewable energy sources, but also become involved in setting the policies that will drive rapid deployment of renewable electricity generation economy-wide, and place greater R&D into storage devices that will deliver electricity from renewable sources 24/7,” it says.

If we hope to phase out dirty sources of energy to address climate change, then - given the massive amounts of electricity needed in order to run computers, provide back-up power and coordinate related cooling equipment that even energy-efficient data centres consume - the last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power.

Companies like Facebook, Google, and other large players in the cloud computing market must advocate for policy change at the local, national and international levels to ensure that the supply of renewable energy increases, as their appetite for energy increases.