>With the cloud computing scenario, time and power savings mean everything, in these huge scales, running hardly used servers is effectively throwing money away as well as annoying the environmentalists. In this scenario resource scheduling becomes amazingly effective. so we go back to our 5:30pm shutdown, but on this occassion the technology hosting the Virtual infrastructure kicks in, instead of sitting there half used, it will begin to migrate VM’s that no longer require resources to the same host, so although as a whole they may be using quite a lot of resource, it will enable hosts to be powered down and be sat in a ‘power saving’ state awaiting resources requirements to increase and as such power up from their slumber. Again, getting to the scale of this, you could effectively save power on as an example, 100 hosts – these hosts being the beefiest and most cutting edge servers available, are going to have requirements for a large amount of power, effectively turning these off when not used, is a god send to the idea of cloud computing. Why leave the light on in the attic if you have no intention of going there?
So that is effectively how these datacentres work from a green perspective, but from the company utilising this infrastructure, what do they save?
- Downsize or offset office space.
- Downsize onsite infrastructure requirements.
- Expand the ability for users to work remotely (or globally dependent on your requirements)
- Support the mobile workforce.
- Reduce consumables use (printing, ink, paper, file storage costs).
- Reduce hardware (desktop computers/server systems/UPS’s/cabling)
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