Smart Metering the Clouds

Smart Metering the Clouds



As cloud computing becomes increasingly pervasive, the data center energy consumption attributable to cloud computing is climbing, despite the clarion call of action to reduce consumption and reverse environmental effects. At the same time, the rising cost of energy - due to regulatory measures enforcing a true cost of energy coupled with finite natural resources rapidly diminishing, resulting in scarcity - is refocusing IT leaders on efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO), particularly in the context of the world-wide financial crisis. We propose a smart metering approach that encompasses all the stakeholders in the cloud computing ecosystem to achieve these twin goals of energy conservation and demand response . As such, this paper introduces our initial thoughts on smart metering and various implications and implementation ideas related to it. cloud computing fulfills the long-held dream of computing as a utility and thus represents an inflection point in the geography of computation and IT services delivery. This paradigm marks a fundamental yet massive shift from the traditional desktop-as-a-platform to internet-as-a-platform model. To achieve the infinite scalability, guaranteed performance and nearly always-on availability demands, these computing platforms are typically deployed in clusters of massive number of servers hosted in dedicated data centers. Each data center houses a large number of heterogeneous components for computing, storage, and networking, together with an infrastructure to distribute power and provide cooling. As the demand for cloud-based services drastically increasing in recent times, the energy consumption attributable to these services by data centers has also been skyrocketing. Recent reports also highlight this growing concern with data center energy consumption and show how current trends could make energy the dominant factor in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) [7]. For example, the approximately 6000 data centers in the United States consumed roughly 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy or about 1.5 percent of the total US electricity consumption in 2006, according to an EPA report . Estimates also indicate that by 2011, data center energy consumption could nearly double [5]. Figure 1 shows how power is becoming the new limiting factor in data center costs. On the other hand, the biggest challenge facing the environment today is global warming, caused by carbon emissions. About 98 percent of C02 emissions (or 87 percent of all CO2-equivalent emissions from all greenhouse gases) can be directly attributed to energy consumption, according to a report by the EIA [6]. The data centers, often dubbed as the SUVs of the tech world , thus contribute in a larger scale to the global warming phenomena. Alarmed by the growing concerns over the rising data center energy costs and its effect on environment, the entire IT ecosystem is quickly realizing these impacts and is making every attempt to achieve energy efficiency. The focus is on energy efficiency opportunities such as reducing the computational power of data centers through efficient application management, increasing the efficiency of servers, cooling systems, power supplies and distribution. Now with the recession pressuring operation budgets, environmental concerns waxing, and energy prices and constraints increasing, we believe that the time is ripe for a different form of doing energy evangelism for data centers. We need to shed the traditional view of how environmentally sustainable data centers are looked at and metered. Our most used approaches : primarily focused on infrastructure optimization- may be too narrow to deal with the power and environmental challenges of tomorrow. This requires an ongoing and holistic approach such as Smart Metering, which is eliciting growing interest among regulatory, legal and advocacy groups and is continuing to garner important commitments from all parts of the IT ecosystem spanning energy suppliers, hardware manufacturers, data centers, cloud service providers, third party software vendors, IT organizations, governments and even end customers

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