The ‘Green Cloud’: Four strategies for a sustainable and responsible digital future

As a cloud service provider, Firstserv Ltd takes its responsibilities towards the environment seriously and is committed to reducing its carbon footprint, pursuing green hosting policies and, in turn, helping customers to be greener themselves

‘Green Cloud’ refers to a sustainable way of cloud computing. It reduces energy demand and saves money while keeping an eye on environmental issues at the same time. Moving traditional IT infrastructure to the cloud is beneficial for the environment in several ways; primarily, it reduces the number of physical servers and increases the average utilisation of available computing units. If cloud providers do it right, a measurable impact on a company’s CO₂ footprint can be achieved.

Recently, ‘Green Cloud’ has become a buzzword as more companies consider the CO2 emissions and the overall carbon footprint of their new cloud service providers’ facilities. Respectively, sustainability and responsibility are becoming the main points of differentiation in the marketplace for global hyperscales like AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure and European cloud companies like OVH.

Strategies for a sustainable and responsible digital future

Firstserv Ltd is putting all its efforts into ensuring its services are as environmentally friendly as possible. The climate crisis and rising energy costs demand future-proofing of the support given to their customers. Improving efficiency is a major step towards a sustainable cloud, particularly regarding physical data centres. Sebastian Tyc, CEO of Firstserv Ltd, outlines the four most effective strategies for creating a sustainable and responsible future of greener cloud services.

1. Be strategic about data centre locations

The operation of a data centre requires loads of energy. While most of this energy is needed to power the servers, a large part also goes into cooling them to protect the equipment. If data centre locations are picked strategically, their power demand can be substantially reduced. For example, data centres in cool regions such as Scandinavia or underground facilities need much less cooling than in desert or subtropical areas like the Southern US.

2. Increase energy efficiency and renewable resources

The main concept behind cloud computing is that services are shared over a network, optimising the resources’ effectiveness. For example, a cloud facility that serves Sydney users during Sydney business hours with a specific service (e.g., a web server) could relocate the same resources to serve European users during European business hours with a different application.

As such, cloud services operate more efficiently than on-premises data centres. It is precisely because of the efficient utilisation of IT resources that cloud computing positively impacts the environment. As data-intensive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and distributed manufacturing systems surge, cloud computing centres must remain energy efficient.

In this regard, modern data centres increasingly use advanced technologies to eliminate wastage at every level of their operations. For example, most of today’s data centres use machine learning to maximise cooling their environments automatically. Besides machine learning, data centres also deploy smart temperature, lighting, and cooling controls to minimise energy use in their environments.

Firstserv Ltd data centres employ renewable energy sources such as geothermal, solar, wind or water-cooling technology. They introduce liquid cooling for processors to minimise their overall carbon footprint. It is also important to ensure that your infrastructure is suitable for hosting your application environment.

3. Use virtualisation for sustainability and cost energy-efficient hardware

Even though cost savings and increased efficiency in business operations are the top drivers of virtualisation, they are not the only benefits. Cloud computing also uses virtualisation to contribute positively to environmental sustainability.

Virtualisation allows an organisation to create several virtual machines (VMs) and run multiple applications on the same physical server via a hypervisor. As such, high-carbon physical machines get replaced with their virtual equivalents.

For example, an organisation could use a single VM rather than a resource-heavy physical server to stream videos. This could help the company to minimise power consumption and the overall carbon footprint. Shifting an on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud means you use fewer servers, and this type uses less power, potentially having a lower impact on the environment.

To reduce the overall need for energy in data centres, cloud providers strive to use optimised and modern hardware and software infrastructure. This is not limited to changing old light bulbs to energy-saving lights! Data centres employ energy-saving strategies such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) or shifting to modern data storage devices. Solid state drives (SSDs) need less power, faster access to data, and last longer than their legacy technology, HDDs. Using optimised hardware, data centres become more efficient and minimise energy demand.

4. Streamline usage

Firstserv Ltd uses multiple strategies to optimise IT workflows at every level. This might include shifting workloads to different times, modifying applications to reduce network traffic, optimising storage and server caches, automating routine tasks or taking other steps to reduce energy usage.

It is also important to ensure that your infrastructure is suitable for hosting your application environment. Firstserv Ltd offers a wide range of options: Hosted Private Cloud, Public Cloud, and a variety of Bare Metal servers. With several Bare Metal options and models available, Firstserv Ltd partners can precisely adjust their ratios (RAM per core ratio, storage per RAM or core, etc.) and ensure they use the best virtual machine for every workload.