Going Green: Cloud Computing and Sustainability

Abstract

The nexus of information and computing technologies, new way of observing both the biosphere and the anthropsphere, and the broadening of the community of interest around global environmental issues, has led to major development and changes around the world. In addition, the fact is that green computing is not a relatively new practice in the industry. In fact, for so many years it has been officially rolled out to the public and to the computing industry, people from computing industry widely accepted this theory. The green computing theory must re-live its advocacy and this time, the need for others to help propagate that the green information technologies (IT) is the necessity of world global sustainable development. Precisely, the green IT is very often cited as the emerging area of research. However, no standard theoretical framework has been widely accepted. In this paper, we attempt to overdue this gap by providing insight views on green IT, with special focus on cloud computing and sustainability. On one hand, cloud computing - large-scale, shared IT infrastructure available over the Internet is transforming the way corporate IT services are delivered and managed. On the other hand, several key factors enable cloud computing to lower energy use and carbon emissions from IT: reducing wasted computing resources, flattening relative peak loads by serving large numbers of organizations and users on shared infrastructure, operating servers at higher utilization rates, utilizing advanced data center infrastructure designs that reduce power loss.