Into the Data Cloud
Bit by digital bit, and with hardly a thought, I am ascending into the cloud.
You likely are too. The cloud -- sometimes called the Cloud, or even just "cloud," sans article -- is the computing reality we're all hurtling toward and to a great extent already inhabiting. The cloud is best defined by what it isn't: a hard drive in your laptop or under your desk, or in a closet at your school or office. Once we filled these hard drives with downloaded songs, digital photos, and moth-eaten e-mails. Now we stream our media (Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Vudu; Pandora, Rhapsody, Slacker), post our pics (Picasa, Flickr), store our files online, use Web-based e-mail, share Google Docs, and exchange Facebook pokes.
We are uploading, outsourcing. And so is big business: companies, universities, entire city governments are forsaking their costly private data centers to instead rent virtual space from "cloud providers" like Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, and Google to e-mail, archive, and collaborate. Within 10 years, according to one estimate, 80 percent of all computing and data storage worldwide will transpire in the cloud.
Naturally, the collective cloud still lives somewhere -- in vast "server farms" in North Carolina, Washington, Oregon, all over. And its emergence raises a number of real-world issues like, oh, the integrity and security of all that data. What the cloud does promise, however, is improved energy efficiency, such that info-tech wonks are tripping over themselves to declare cloud computing the "green computing option." By migrating to the cloud, it seems, I do old Earth a favor.
Maybe, sort of. Existing data centers are notoriously inefficient. Mostly they rev their engines, waiting for rare periods of peak demand -- and operating at less than 15 percent of their maximum capacity. In 2006 U.S. data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of energy; figure about 80 percent of that energy -- enough to fuel six million homes for a year -- was spent running processors that processed absolutely nothing.
Cloud-computing centers, in contrast, use "virtualization" software to simulate many more computers than actually exist. These virtual machines can be conjured or dispelled to match demand, so the actual machines can run closer to their full capacity. In theory, that saves energy. There isn't yet a standard way, though, to measure how much better optimized cloud servers are than old-fashioned data centers.
As data centers consolidate, their owners face pressure to lower energy costs. Roughly half the electricity that enters a cloud center goes toward cooling it, and several of the cloud giants are building new facilities designed to reduce that drain. Recently the island of Mauritius proposed plans to develop a cloud center cooled by seawater. Meanwhile, pundits are buzzing about a "follow the moon" strategy, in which server loads might be shuffled from place to place, across latitudes and time zones, to take advantage of cooler temperatures or cheaper power.
Of course, not all power is green power, moonlit though it may be. No sooner did Facebook advertise the virtues of the impressive new cloud facility it plans to build in Oregon than Greenpeace started a Facebook group called "Stop Facebook from Switching to Dirty Coal," noting that Facebook's intended energy supplier, Pacific Power, generates most of its electricity from coal. Of course, electric cars use coal too, if indirectly, and they're very green.
The real issue is that the cloud is growing. It is more energy-efficient than what it's replacing, but it isn't using less energy overall. Data centers in the United States currently devour an amount of energy equivalent to 1.5 percent of the world's total electricity consumption, and that share is rising. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, calls this "the paradox of abundance": the more efficiently the cloud uses electricity, the more of it we consume with our ever-expanding arsenal of always-on smart phones, tablets, and other gadgets. That the cloud seems free to use -- Georgetown University analyst Michael Nelson has called Gmail "the entry drug of cloud users" -- only obscures its magnificent, and climbing, cost.
I like the cloud; it's comfy, it's handy. (This article was largely written on it.) But it's like my membership at Costco: it makes me green the same way "Buy More, Save More" saves me money. Sure, we save energy by computing in bulk -- but only if we had planned on computing that much anyway. Some say the cloud will pay for itself, by automatically turning off our lights at night, maybe, or making CDs obsolete. I'm less sure. One study predicts that by the year 2015, the amount of data we exchange on the Internet will have increased tenfold, most of it in the form of videos. It troubles me to think that a tropical island nation is investing in my desire to stream old episodes of Lost. I wonder: when I become one with the cloud, will I still remember what a real one looks like?