Sending a Message in a Bottle Uses More Energy than Gmail in a Year

Google cares a lot about its green credentials and does a lot to lower its carbon footprint and generally do green business. This drive is not only great for the environment, but it's also great for Google's image too.

Not that anyone's complaining that Google gets a little good will by striving to run a green operation.

But Google also boasts that it can turn your business into a green one as well, at least in terms of some of the computing, all you have to do is start using Google products, Gmail for example.

In a blog post, Google is touting the advantages of the cloud and the energy savings a company can gain by switching to the Google cloud rather than using an in-house data center and servers.

"We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses," David Jacobowitz, program manager, Green Engineering and Operations, wrote.

"The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient (PDF) than running in-house email," he said.

"This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization 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," he explained.

The results are fairly intuitive, several servers running round the clock to power an email app that it used to send maybe a few hundreds of at most a few thousands of emails a day in a small company, are going to use up a lot of energy.

And that energy goes to waste since the servers aren't doing anything most of the time. But cloud operators can't afford to have servers sitting around doing nothing, in fact, the reason why cloud computing makes economical sense is because the servers are working non-stop.

Google has a few interesting examples of just how efficient the cloud can be. It says that it takes more energy to drink a bottle of wine, put a message in it and throw it in the sea than it takes to use Gmail for an entire year.

But the energy savings aren't for Gmail alone, Google says that making and shipping a single DVD is the equivalent of watching YouTube for three days straight, in terms of energy usage.