Google save money, wastes time by Doug money

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 8 2011)

1. 

   Timing is everything.  Yesterday, Google came out with a white paper saying its Gmail email service can be almost 80 times more energy efficient than running email in-house, between optimized server utilization, fine-tuned software (I hear a knock on Microsoft Exchange), and highly efficient data centers.  Hosting video on YouTube delivers savings "even more striking," blogs The Goog.  And then Google Docs goes off-line for thirty minutes on the same day, underlining that efficiency isn't anything without reliability.

   Don't get me wrong, Google makes a great argument in its white paper, "Google's Green Computing: Efficiency at Scale."  The company looks at email server energy usage, comparing small, medium, and large businesses, finding that smaller organizations that run their own email server burn more energy than larger ones who can fully load up a single server.

   Pages two and three of Google's Green cloud white paper discusses "Redundancy and Reliability" and the number of servers necessary to provide redundancy through backup email servers, redundant storage, backup network links and co-locating servers in multiple separate physical locations.  Google's model argues that small and medium sized businesses would need an N+1 (two servers) redundancy plan while a larger organization with 10 servers could get away with a N+0.2N plan.  With more servers, comes more power consumption per user.

   The model gets carried through to the data center and the efficiencies to be gained by putting apps in the cloud and how Google has optimized its servers, power supplies and software, delivering email at an annual  rate of under 2.2 kWh per user.  A small business might burn up to 175 kWH per user, putting up to 103 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere, while The Goog's model says that a Gmail user would put less than 1.23 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere -- and that's before you start talking about how Google says it has been carbon neutral since 2007.

   It all sounds marvelous -- but if businesses can't get timely access to their data, all the carbon savings in the world becomes irrelevant.   Google Docs took a nose dive for about 30 to 40 minutes between 11:30 AM and noon ET on the same day the company was publishing it's "We have the most green email service" white paper. 

   Compounding matters, Google Docs isn't designed to store and work with files off-line.  So if you don't have cloud resources because you're on an airplane or otherwise out of reach of a network, or if the back-end server goes down, you are dead in the water, and have to shift to a different method of doing business.

   It's a mess.  In the short term, Google needs to explain why it had the outage and what it will do to prevent it from happening again. (Until something different breaks and causes an outage -- history says stuff happens).  

   But it remains to be seen if Google will leave its purity for a pure cloud, "always-on" solution to migrate to a more reasonable model where stuff does happen -- and enable people to do work once in a while without the cloud.

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