Cloud management company Cirrus Nexus has launched a tool which gives organisations a view of the carbon emissions associated with cloud operations.
TrueCarbon, a development of the company’s cloud accounting tools, lets companies fix an internal price of carbon and track emissions in real-time, so they can make actual changes in the location of cloud loads to minimise environmental impact.
The tool will allow companies to make trade-offs and understand the carbon produced if they move their workloads to the cheapest cloud, rather than the least carbon-intensive, he explained. Companies can decide on an internal price for carbon, which would incentivise better behaviour.
The tool takes in data on carbon intensity from local utility grids and relates that with the reported strategies of cloud providers. It also calculates energy usage based on the manufacturers’ data for the servers involved and PUE from the data centre operators. The company says it might be cost-effective to move workloads to less carbon-intensive clouds when their activity is ramping up in a busy period.
Cirrus added that businesses have difficulty addressing the issue because there is little visibility into carbon emissions produced by cloud operations, but they directly impact global warming.
