There have been a flurry of “green cloud” announcements recently, and that got us thinking about the relationship between green IT and saving money. Green is also the color of money, after all, and companies are discovering that reducing data center costs leads to substantial green benefits. The cloud takes cost reduction and green even further.
In the first announcement, IBM continues to innovate in cloud and in green, and it has patented technology for distributing compute workloads for cloud computing in a way that reduces power consumption. I’d liken it to a load balancer, but instead of trying to reduce response times, they’re trying to reduce power utilization overall. Now, it’s really interesting because this is not just a green initiative but it is also a cost-savings opportunity for cloud service providers.
Power consumption is a major cost driver for cloud service providers. Often, it’s pay-as-you go for storage, for compute, even for bandwidth. But no cloud provider is really charging for power utilization. This is a way for cloud service providers to reduce their sunk cost and improve their margins without having to charge the customers more. It’s green, but it’s also green for your wallet.