Missing Link: The dream of the green cloud

How much CO ₂ – Emissions are with “Hello Siri!” tied together? How high is the water consumption? What is the raw material cost behind the computing power? And how much energy does the small voice command cost? The answer is short: you don’t know. Not yet. Because Siri is a distributed application. What happens in the iPhone app and what goes on in the server application is an Apple company secret.

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What is missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, there is often the time to rearrange all the news and backgrounds. We want it at the weekend take us, follow the side paths away from the current, try different perspectives and make nuances audible.

How do you measure the environmental consumption of a cloud service?

In order to shed more light on the “black box cloud”, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration and the Berlin Öko-Institut investigated uts for the Federal Environment Agency in the project “Green Cloud Computing” four typical usage scenarios: storage, streaming, video conference and virtual desktop. Statements can now be made about these individual cloud services if they relate to the environmental consumption of a specific cloud service in a specific data center. The study was recently published.

The new Green Cloud Computing methodology (GCC methodology) records the environmental expenditure for the production of information technology and for its operation of data centers in four impact categories: raw material consumption (ADP), greenhouse gas emissions (GWP), cumulative energy consumption (CED) and water consumption. The environmental expenditure can be named for individual service units. This can be an hour of use, a single customer, or a uniform amount of data. The GCC methodology can be used for an environmental product declaration such as a CO ₂ footprint or an energy consumption label for cloud services.

In order to be able to record and evaluate the environmental impact of different types of use for a “proof of concept”, the researchers looked for cloud services, that offer exactly one type of use as a service in order to be able to derive a statement about the specific cloud uses from their consumption. The water consumption was not taken into account because none of the data centers examined had water-relevant cooling systems and building technology. The key figures for raw material consumption could only be generated for two data centers.

Key figures for online storage, streaming services and video conferencing

For the evaluation of online storage, the scientists examined four data centers and found that the range of GCC indicators from 166 to 280 kilograms of CO ₂ – Equivalents per terabyte of storage space were sufficient. The statement states how many CO ₂ emissions are released annually per terabyte of occupied online storage.

A streaming service was investigated for video streaming that works like a kind of online video recorder: users can record any film online and watch it later without license fees. This means that the server and storage infrastructure is used exclusively for streaming. A CO ₂ footprint of 1.46 grams of CO2 equivalents was generated per hour of video stream. Added to this are 0.014 micrograms of antimony equivalents for raw material consumption and 24 kilojoules for primary energy. A complete CO ₂ balance for video streaming would, however, also have to include the CO ₂ – Include emissions in networks and in households.

An online platform was investigated for video conferencing based on the open source software Jitsy video conferencing offers. The greenhouse gas emissions for participating in one hour of video conference are 2.27 grams of CO ₂ – equivalents for the manufacture of the server (15 percent) and for the energy consumption in the Data center (85 percent). The choice of end device plays the decisive role for the overall balance: while participating in a video conference with a laptop with 55 grams of CO ₂ equivalents / hour connected, it is already 295 grams of CO ₂ – equivalents / hour with a large video monitor.

Record energy consumption: yes, measure energy efficiency: no

For the calculation example for the virtual desktop infrastructure, an authority supplied 890 thin client workstations via its own data center: For this In the data center, raw materials amounting to 0.22 grams of antimony equivalents, greenhouse gas emissions of 59 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents and primary energy of 995 megajoules are used every year. About three quarters of this effort is accounted for on the server side.

In their project, the researchers showed that it is possible to record environmental consumption and that consumption also changes can be assigned to individual services.

However, there is still a long way to go in practice. Both the IT industry association Bitkom and the Internet association eco already consider a more precise recording of energy consumption to be less practical, of water, CO ₂ emissions and not to mention raw materials. After all, the Bitkom association is in favor of developing a Europe-wide uniform energy label based on existing standards such as the data center standard EN50600. In principle, an energy pass for data centers, as envisaged by the Federal Environment Agency, should “only be issued on the basis of criteria customary in the industry”. That means: record energy consumption: yes, measure energy efficiency: no. Incidentally, he rejects the away.