InsightaaS: Tom Raftery of GreenMonk (the energy/sustainability practice of analyst firm RedMonk) has published a table reviewing renewable energy usage by a half-dozen cloud computing companies in the excellent Enterprise Irregulars blog site. While a sample of six providers isn’t really definitive, it’s encouraging to see that attention on this issue has moved beyond Greenpeace to more serious commentators on sustainability in IT.
Cloud computing is booming. Cloud providers are investing billions in infrastructure to build out their data centers, but just how clean is cloud?
Given that this is the week that the IPCC’s 5th assessment report was released, I decided to do some research of my own into cloud providers. The table above is a list of the cloud computing providers I looked into, and what I found.
It is a real mixed bag but from the table you can see that Icelandic cloud provider Greenqloud comes out on top because they are using the electricity from the 100% renewable Icelandic electricity grid to power their infrastructure.
On the Windows Azure front, Microsoft announced in May of 2012 that it was going to go carbon neutral for its facilities and travel. Microsoft are now, according to the EPA, the second largest purchaser of renewable energy in the US…
Read the entire post: http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/73557/cloud-computing-companies-ranked-use-renewable-energy/
