Calling it a full-fledged tree-hugger may be a slight overstatement, but cloud computing is being viewed as an eco-friendly service that reduces the number of machines and the carbon footprint of enterprises.
Thanks to virtualization and server utilization rates of around 60-70 percent, large, shared data centers are usually able to employ fewer physical machines to achieve the same capacity as an equivalent number of in-house data centers, according to an article on GreenerIdeal.com.
Large data centers can also dynamically allocate resources where they’re needed, where individual enterprises must often buy more machines than they need to handle peak data loads. This reduction in physical servers means less energy expended in running, cooling, manufacturing, transporting, and replacing these machines, and that can mean big savings over time.