Gmail: It’s cooler in the cloud

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

Cloud computing is secure, simple, keeps you productive and saves you money. But the cloud can also save energy. A recent report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix estimates that cloud computing has the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of metric tons. And Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford who has led several studies on data center energy use, has written that for many enterprises, the cloud “is significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centres.”

Because we’re committed to sustainability, we sharpened our pencils and looked at our own services to see how they stack up against the alternatives.

We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient than running in-house email. This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilisation rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.
An illustration of inefficient server utilisation by smaller companies compared to efficient utilisation in the cloud.

If you’re more of a romantic than a businessperson, think of it this way: It takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, as long as you count the energy used to make the bottle and the wine you drank.


We ran a similar calculation for YouTube and the results are even more striking: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To put that in perspective, it takes about eight seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount. You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.

In calculating these numbers, we included the energy used by all the Google infrastructure supporting Gmail and YouTube. Of course, your own laptop or phone also consumes energy while you’re accessing Google, so it’s important to choose an efficient model.

There’s still a lot to learn about the global impacts of cloud computing, but one thing we can say with certainty: bit for bit, email for email, and video for video, it’s more efficient in the cloud.

Posted by David Jacobowitz, Program Manager, Green Engineering and Operations

Eureka Prize Winner Announced

Last night Associate Professor David Moss from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney was announced as the winner of the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science.

Associate Professor Moss was awarded the prize for his work in incorporating light onto silicon computer chips. This groundbreaking work has led to the development of a laser that allows light to be generated on silicon chips, which overcomes many energy and bandwidth obstacles for on-chip and chip-to-chip communications.

Associate Professor Moss was joined at last night’s Eureka Prize dinner by finalists who submitted excellent entries:

• Professor Gerwin Klein, SEL4 Project Team from NICTA, have created the first general purpose operating system kernel with a machine checked formal proof of correctness, covering high level security properties down to low level code.
• Professor Rajkumar Buyya, The Cloudbus Project from the University of Melbourne, who have developed architectural principles and software technologies that enable high-performance, scalable, and energy-efficient Cloud computing.

I would like to thank all the people and teams who entered the prize and to congratulate Associate Professor Moss for his work.

Google Australia is delighted to sponsor the Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. We’re passionately committed to promoting innovation in computer science here in Australia and we believe that it creates great benefits for society.

Posted by Ben Appleton, Software Engineer

Pure and proven cloud architecture

This is a cross-post from the Official Enterprise Blog.

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series that explores the top ten reasons why customers trust Google with their business data. A complete top ten list can be found here.

When users think of Google Apps, they often think of their Gmail inboxes or collaborating on documents in real time with others. They often don’t think of what’s going on behind the scenes. Our cloud computing data centers offer our customers scalability and reliability across all of our products and websites, supporting millions of businesses on Google Apps and over 1 billion Internet searches every day. Our pure and proven cloud offers Apps customers significant data protections that would be hard for those customers to achieve on their own. It’s also the infrastructure that we use to run our own business.

As we’ve grown, we’ve developed an expertise around building data centers and protecting the data stored in them. The machines in the data centers that run our applications are built to our own specifications, including ones focused on security. The hardware is limited to what is necessary for the applications to run, and eliminates unnecessary components such as peripheral connectors or video cards. Similarly, the software that we run on the machines is a specialized, stripped-down version of the Linux operating system leaving out any unnecessary software code such as device drivers. This approach helps provide a computing environment that is less prone to vulnerabilities, compared to typical on-premise, so called “private cloud” or hybrid IT environments.

The services we offer are first and foremost Internet-based applications and platforms. We were born on the Internet, not on a single computer or server. We have published some of our core underlying technologies such as BigTable, the SPDY protocol, Google FIle System (GFS) and MapReduce. The last two of which have gone on to inspire Hadoop, the Apache open source framework that underpins many leading cloud or big data applications. Googlers Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle even wrote a mini-book about some of Google’s approaches, entitled “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines”.

Lots of users leads to lots of network traffic that allows us some significant advantages in terms of security. For instance, the spam filtering in Gmail gains rapid visibility into emerging and evolving spam and virus threats, which in turn helps us to block the vast majority of them. This kind of large scale Internet infrastructure also typically provides better protection from denial of service type attacks. It also puts us in a position to spot malicious traffic and help protect users from malware.

Unprecedented global scale would not matter without the ability to reliably deliver business critical services. That is another powerful feature of Google’s technology and process discipline. We’ve built our platform to withstand expected hardware failure, relying on software and highly automated processes in order to support a 99.9% uptime SLA that has no maintenance window. In 2010 Gmail uptime was 99.984% and we are over 99.99% for the first half of 2011. This is an approach you fundamentally can’t take with traditional on premise IT systems.

Running data centers at this kind of scale takes energy, but as a carbon-neutral company we strive to use as little as possible - in fact, our facilities use half the energy of a typical data center. You can read more about our efficiency efforts and our approach to purchasing renewable energy.

In just the 4.5 years I’ve been at Google, I’ve seen quite a few generational changes in the kit we run, be it “simple” things like sheet metal for servers to something more complex like our motherboards, or something even more fluid and complicated like our various software layers. Through all those upgrades, build outs, and migrations, the focus on reliability remains. This is something that keeps me coming back to work day after day, and drives me to help others understand the value we can add to protecting their data and powering their businesses.

Posted by John Collins, Senior Global Trust PM, Google Apps

The Internet and the future of work

When Deloitte Access Economics gave us the results of their research on the impact of the Internet on the Australian economy, I turned directly to the section on “The Impact of the Internet on Businesses”. In the Google Enterprise team, we see every day that the Internet has transformed the way businesses operate. But I was curious to see the numbers around how it’s transforming how people work.

I’d also heard the Australian Government’s goal of doubling the level of teleworking in the Australian economy by 2020 -- a call that was repeated this week at Telework Sydney by Minister Stephen Conroy. He said that the internet promises to transform “who is able to work, when you can work, where you can work and how you can work” -- with huge benefits to both employers and employees. This vision becomes a reality with the rollout of high speed broadband access to all Australians.

According to the Deloitte Access Economics report “The Connected Continent,” more than 40% of businesses surveyed report that the internet has already impacted the ability of their staff to work remotely and enables flexible working arrangements.

This is a good solid number and not a surprise. But that still means that well over half of businesses may not be taking advantage of the combination of high speed broadband access and cloud-based applications that can make a big difference to how their teams work -- and live.

If you want to give team members a day a week to work from home, you can still keep productivity high and hassle-free. You can sit down and collaborate on a document together easily, without the hassle of emailing attachments back and forth and forgetting who has the latest version. With Google Docs, you can see your teammate making changes right on the screen -- the words are literally appearing and changing before your eyes. Internet-based applications are also making the smartphones and tablets that many of us have much more useful; you can easily get to your mail, documents, and calendar even when you’re not at your desk.

And then there’s the fact that it’s hard to convince Aussies to move cities. If your dream employee lives in Melbourne and you can’t convince them to move to Sydney, you now have a lot more effective (and cost-effective) tools that make it easy to build team bonds across distance. Video technology keeps getting easier to use, so remote employees don’t have to miss the team bonding. We’ve built video chat right into Gmail so it’s always easily at hand. At Google we hop on and off video chats all day -- even with people in the same office -- to get that extra connection of face to face conversation.

At Google, we’re going to keep making our tools for team collaboration even better. And as high speed broadband access becomes a reality across more of Australia, these new ways of working are going to become the norm, not a nice to have. Are you ready to embrace this new way of working?

Posted by Stuart McLean, Enterprise Sales Lead, Australia and New Zealand

An Aussie’s Take on Google I/O

I spent last week at Google I/O, Google’s annual conference for developers held in San Francisco. This conference is all about making the web a better place -- the nuts and bolts of software development that most folks don’t ever think about when they add apps to their Android phones or when they log into their Gmail. What’s interesting about all these developers getting stoked about building the apps of the future is that they take one thing for granted: high speed Internet connectivity. That’s not to say they don’t recognise that sometimes connectivity is slow or erratic -- they do, and we’re all trying to find ways to make sure our apps can work in those situations. What I mean is that their starting assumption is that high speed connectivity is fast becoming like electricity or running water -- never far away when you need it, and plenty of it. I love this optimism -- and it’s this optimism that is bringing the National Broadband Network to Australia.

Out of all the exciting announcements that came out of Google this week, every single one of them relies on high speed broadband. YouTube movie rentals -- tick. Syncing your music library and movies from Android Market across your PC and your Android tablet and phone -- tick. Using a Chromebook, where your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you don't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files -- tick. These products will run on the networks we we have now, but just imagine their potential -- and the potential of the ideas of all the developers in Moscone Center and those around the world watching Google I/O streamed over YouTube -- when we have high speed Internet everywhere.

Most of us in the Sydney office wish we had a dollar for every time someone asked us about the NBN, “Yeah, but what are you going to do with all that speed?” or “What’s Google’s vision for how to use all that bandwidth?” I think we saw a taste of it at Google I/O.

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director, Google Australia

On Cloud 9 – digital everything

This is the Lightning Talk I gave for Sydney Cloud Camp, held in the Google Australia office last week. It's about convergence of cloud computing and digital everything. It’s a very happy convergence, so I’m calling it “cloud 9”, symbolising a good place to be.

First, what do I mean by “digital everything”? Digital everything is just that, the digitisation of everything, at least, everything that is digitisable. There are of course things that don’t lend themselves to digitisation. For example, it may be some time before humans can ingest digital food! But many, if not most, of our informational and creative needs can be satisfied digitally. Digitisation is a form of de-materialisation, i.e., separating the bits from the material.

We’re already seeing it for media such as music and books, and more recently transit information and newspapers. But what if even more things were digitised? In business and government alike, let's face it, paper processes still dominate. Think of all those wasted directories that you use as door jams, and all that legal paperwork, that has yet to be digitised. The pace will pick up over the next few years, as it becomes main stream to collaborate around rich media, video, and complex business applications. But there's still a bunch of physical things out there just waiting to be digitised!

So where does the cloud fit in? First, what do we mean by the cloud? I'll define cloud computing as the intersection of "software as a service" and "utility computing". SaaS is about deploying applications as a service. Utility computing is about packaging computing resources (compute/storage/memory/network) as a metered service, similar to a traditional public utility.

Digitisation needs both aspects of the cloud. Without the cloud, digitisation means that information gets squirreled away on machines scattered around the globe. It’s pointless. The SasS aspect is what makes digital things accessible and useful and the utility aspect is what makes it scale affordably. The cloud also makes it possible to collaborate using digital information in new ways. For example, how many people ever collaborated using a physical street directory? In contrast, digital maps, naturally lend themselves to collaboration and have given rise to powerful mashups. Google Maps is a great example of this, with over half the traffic now coming from mashups on other web sites.

I also believe that the environmental benefits of cloud computing and digital things are significant. Digitisation is very green, for two reasons. First, and simplest, more digital things means fewer physical things, which in turn means fewer (precious) resources to move those physical things. Second, more digital information means more informed users. For example, when everyone has a detailed understanding of their home energy use or home water use, we can find all sorts of ways to save energy and lower power and water bills. Google PowerMeter is a great example. The cloud itself is also inherently green, because it leverages demand variability to achieve higher computer utilisation, also known as elastic computing. Higher computer utilisation in turn means doing more computational work with fewer machines, fewer idle machines, and lower energy costs, etc.

Digital everything will also profoundly affect education. Any person, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. A doctor in the remotest part of Borneo will have access to every medical textbook every written. Or a schoolgirl in the outback will be able search all of Shakespeare’s works. It's "distance learning" on steroids.

Digital everything can also be a powerful force for democracy. Giving people the power to share and search the world’s information will continue to break down barriers and bring communities together. Of course, we need to guard against digital things becoming exclusively the realm of some digital elite or "digerati". Never has the adage, “information is power”, been truer. So it’s imperative that we, as a society, ensure equitable access to the world's information. Here in Australia, the proposed National Broadband Network (NBN) has great potential to level this information playing field, providing we get the regulatory settings right.

The cloud of digital things will improve the environment, education, democracy and more.

What can you digitise that will make lives better?

Posted by Alan Noble, Head of Engineering, Google Australia and NZ