SALESFORCE.COM AND THE ENVIRONMENT: Reducing Carbon Emissions in the

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com 03 Executive Summary 04 Introduction 05 Approach & Methodology 06 Summary of Findings 08 How does salesforce.com’s cloud platform deliver exceptional energy and carbon efficiency? 12 Conclusion

14 Footnotes 15 Appendix Executive Summary

Despite their similar labels, To more rigorously assess the server capacity to demand; and applies environmental impact of cloud multitenancy to serve thousands of various “” computing, salesforce.com engaged organizations with one set of shared offerings differ greatly WSP Environment & Energy to compare infrastructure. Further, salesforce.com the energy use and carbon footprint of appears to be leading the way in in their environmental its cloud platform and services against designing, building and operating cloud impact and their potential equivalent on-premises and virtualized service hubs that minimize energy deployments. use for a given amount of computing to improve on the power (not only at an operational level). environmental footprint Our analysis shows that salesforce.com’s Further, they can employ energy-saving massively scalable, multitenant cloud innovations at a scale that only the of legacy IT models. computing platform is substantially largest on premises or virtualized data more carbon efficient that on-premises center owner / operators could feasibly systems or even virtualized data center manage. For those few companies deployments (also known as “private that do have a scale of operations cloud” deployments). Specifically, the appropriate to a large-scale task-specific study found that: infrastructure, this study identifies the key drivers that will let them optimize n A salesforce.com transaction is on for the greatest efficiency as well. average 95% more carbon efficient than when processed in an equivalent This study shows that there are clear on-premises deployment; and significant energy and carbon emission reduction benefits associated n A salesforce.com transaction is on with the migration of services and average 64% more carbon efficient applications to a cloud environment, and than when processed in an equivalent also details how salesforce.com’s cloud private cloud deployment; and platform enables further efficiencies over a private cloud / virtualized data center n Salesforce.com’s estimated total deployment. While individual companies customer carbon emissions footprint may begin to realize lowered emissions for 2010 is at least 19 times at the local scale by decommissioning smaller than an equivalent on- their equipment and using cloud services premises deployment, and is 3 times to more efficiently run their businesses, smaller than an equivalent private cumulative reductions in carbon cloud deployment. emissions at the platform level signal an untapped potential to significantly reduce Salesforce.com’s cloud platform enables global carbon emissions (expressed much higher utilization of servers; uses across salesforce.com’s existing and elastic provisioning to better match growing customer base).

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.03 Introduction

The use of IT is increasingly being not all cloud models are the same positioned as a tool to realize and there are varying degrees of environmental sustainability goals, efficiency within various types of allowing companies to measure, analyze, clouds. As businesses continue to manage and report on environmental evaluate a move to the cloud, a data to mitigate risk and reduce their greater understanding of specific cloud overall impact1. At the same time, the computing providers’ environmental choice of IT infrastructure and services performance may be another factor to is increasingly being seen as a consider. The degree to which businesses component of a company’s carbon and, more broadly, the environment may footprint that can enable control of their stand to gain when choosing between scale and growth over time. Specifically, on premises computing, a private cloud cloud computing has emerged as and a multitenant public cloud is less a solution that reduces hardware well known. requirements, provides scalability and offers direct energy and carbon Commissioned by salesforce.com, emissions reductions; as well as enabling WSP Environment & Energy (WSP) more efficient business processes, performed a quantitative analysis scalability and improved communication of salesforce.com’s cloud platform and collaboration. to compare the energy and carbon efficiency of its service offering – within While a previous report2 captured the context of equivalent on-premises how cloud computing broadly offers and private cloud deployments – to the potential to greatly reduce the better quantify the potential impact environmental impact of IT (mostly of cloud computing. due to its flexible, scalable model),

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.04 Approach & Methodology

WSP developed a Within each of the three deployment The critical inputs for this analysis include: scenarios, three organizational sizes are quantitative model that considered: small (under 100 users), n Users: Number of users required calculates the life cycle medium (under 500 users), and large by the system at any given period (over 500 users, up to 10,000) to of time. carbon emissions of account for non-linear server scaling salesforce.com’s cloud requirements. Results are expressed in n Transactions: Measured API and Web terms of percentage savings in estimated requests processed by the platform, platform (called Force.com), carbon emissions. per day over a one year period7. and compared the results The footprint of salesforce.com’s n Server Count: Number of servers to the equivalent services multitenant cloud platform4 was required to support the platform provided within an assessed by collecting energy and business applications. This is consumption data, architecture inclusive of business continuity and on-premises and private configuration and annual transaction disaster recovery. cloud deployment. information from the company’s data center operations as of December 31, n Device Utilization: Computational The methodology used to develop this 2010 for the preceding one year period. load that a device (server, network, independent model is in line with the The on-premises5 and private cloud6 or storage array) is handling relative assessment methodology developed deployments were modeled based to the specified peak load. by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative on prior research completed by WSP, (GeSI)3 and other best practice with additional input and modeling n Transmission: Energy standards. This model quantifies energy recommendations from subject matter required for data transfer through use and carbon emissions on a experts including and access technologies and the internet per-transaction and per-user basis and Jonathan G. Koomey, PhD., Consulting backbone for salesforce.com’s cloud considers three deployment scenarios: Professor at Stanford University. platform and private cloud on premises, private cloud environments. and salesforce.com’s cloud platform. n Power Consumption per type of IT hardware: Calculated energy consumed by a server at a given rate of device utilization and On Premises: estimated power for networking is purchased and provisioned on dedicated hardware by a single and storage equipment. company. The equipment and facility is owned and operated on-site by the individual company. n Embedded Energy for IT hardware: LCA estimates of embedded energy Private Cloud (i.e. Virtualized Data Center): on a per-server basis. Software is licensed and provisioned on a virtualized and dedicated capacity based system to a single company by an outsourced data center service provider. n Data Center Power Usage The equipment and facility is owned and operated off-site by a data center Effectiveness (PUE): Defined as service provider. the ratio of overall power drawn by the data center facility to the Salesforce.com’s Cloud: power delivered to the IT hardware. Software is licensed and provisioned on a shared multitenant architecture to many This is a location specific data center companies as an internet-based software-as-a-service provider. The equipment is efficiency metric that accounts owned and operated by the service provider the equipment is located in private for energy consumption of suites at a data center service provider. active cooling, power conditioning, lighting, and other critical data center infrastructure8.

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.05 Summary 95% average estimated decrease in of Findings carbon emissions per-transaction

The results of the analysis show that salesforce.com’s cloud platform delivers 64% average estimated decrease in significantly lower carbon carbon emissions per-transaction emissions on a per- transaction and per-user On-Premise basis when compared to Private Cloud Salesforce.com’s both on-premises and Figure 1: Comparison of estimated carbon Cloud Platform emissions of on premise, private cloud and private cloud deployments. salesforce.com’s cloud platform on a per-transaction processed basis.

Estimated avoided carbon emissions solution which is typically sized based infrastructure based upon number of from using salesforce.com’s cloud upon both transactions required and the users. When compared at this level, platform are: number of users. the analysis found that estimated carbon emission reductions by organization n A salesforce.com transaction is on The carbon efficiency advantages that size range between 50% and 90%. average 95% more carbon efficient salesforce.com’s cloud platform offers This indicates that while deployment than when processed in an equivalent compared to on premises is significant. size does matter, the advantage that on-premises deployment; Dedicated infrastructure associated salesforce.com’s cloud platform provides n A salesforce.com transaction is on with on premises deployments typically over a traditional on-premises solution average 64% more carbon efficient operate at very low utilization levels and remains significant and provides than when processed in an equivalent do not benefit from the key features of additional proof points for a comparison private cloud deployment; and public cloud computing; multitenancy and of carbon efficiency. n Salesforce.com’s estimated total elastic provisioning which offer scalability customer carbon emissions (both up and down) and higher footprint is at least 19 times smaller utilization rates9. While a private cloud than an equivalent on-premises does benefit from elastic provisioning deployment, and is 3 times and higher utilization rates, it is clear that smaller than an equivalent private multitenancy is a critical driver of carbon cloud deployment. efficiency. As organizations continue to evaluate a potential move to the cloud, Small: 90% estimated decrease The study focuses on a per-transaction corporate IT and sustainability managers in carbon emissions by using metric to compare the efficiency of should consider these key differences salesforce.com on a per-user basis each deployment, which provides a across each deployment scenario which greater depth of analysis of the inherent affects both business performance and Medium: 86% estimated decrease in differences in platform efficiency. With environmental value. carbon emissions by using an emphasis on transactions, rather than salesforce.com on a per-user basis the number of users, the methodology While a per-transaction metric better reflects the key indicator of provides a more holistic comparison of efficiency for a cloud computing solution efficiency, businesses with on-premises Large: 50% estimated decrease - the number of transactions that can solutions are required to size their IT in carbon emissions by using be processed over a period of time salesforce.com on a per-user basis (not only the equivalent number of users that the solution can support). This methodology also enables a more Figure 2: Comparison of estimated carbon accurate comparison of salesforce..com emissions of on premises by size of organization to salesforce.com’s cloud platform on a per-user On-Premises cloud platform to a private cloud 1-99 Users On-Premises processed basis. 100-499 Users On-Premises 500+ Users Salesforce.com’s Cloud Platform

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.06 Case Study

Salesforce.com customers 86% estimated decrease in and Altium realize carbon emissions per-user significant carbon savings from salesforce.com’s 80% estimated decrease in cloud platform. carbon emissions per-user

While the estimates for on premises organizations are compelling, WSP engaged with two salesforce.com customers who have transitioned their IT operations to saleforce.com’s cloud platform to determine whether actual reductions in energy were achieved.

Nimbus provides Business Process Management software, training and Medium On-Premises consulting services to global clients Altium from 10 offices around the world and Salesforce.com’s has been a salesforce.com customer Cloud Platform and partner since 2004. All of the company’s human resources, finance, , sales, support, timesheets, audit, project and employee holiday tracking applications are now run on salesforce.com’s cloud platform. demands of the on premises system that Figure 3: Comparison of estimated avoided Similarly, Altium, a , Australia was required to support the businesses carbon emissions for an on premises medium activities as well as the added services sized business (100-499 users), Altium’s estimated based provider of electronic design avoided emissions and salesforce.com’s cloud tools, recently transitioned from an on currently provided from salesforce.com. platform footprint on a per-user basis. premises infrastructure to salesforce. Due to a lack of available on premises com’s cloud platform for support of transaction data, WSP modeled the all of its CRM, purchase requisition, estimated savings on a per-user basis. HR, costing / liabilities management, electronic testing, events registration In the case of Nimbus, by retiring their and customer licensing system needs. on premises equipment and fully moving to salesforce.com’s cloud platform, WSP worked with both companies to the realized emissions reductions quantify the environmental value of achieved are roughly in line with the using salesforce.com’s cloud platform estimates projected in the study on by assessing the hardware, software a per-user basis. and corresponding energy consumption

“We used salesforce.com’s cloud “Our transition to salesforce.com platform to reduce our IT carbon enabled the retirement of a emissions by 95% over our significant portion of our previous on premises system,” on premises IT hardware stated Ian Gotts, CEO, Nimbus. infrastructure”, Alan Perkins, CIO, Altium. “The result is an estimated 80% reduction in the energy and carbon footprint per user.” How does salesforce.com’s cloud platform deliver exceptional energy and carbon efficiency?

Our research uncovered that the salesforce.com multitenancy architecture is the key to substantial energy and carbon efficiency performance that it enables as compared to on premises or a private cloud. Specifically, the multitenancy design combined with salesforce.com’s unique code architecture result in a remarkably low, but highly utilized, number of servers. Two additional key drivers which impact the energy and carbon efficiency include Elastic Provisioning and Data Center Efficiency (typically expressed as PUE).

Multitenancy & Code Architecture

Cloud computing is defined by many effectively lower than in the multitenant As the salesforce.com community of authorities as serving multiple customers model that allocates server processing users grows, the platform design can simultaneously with a shared server cycles – not server hardware units. efficiently manage the way in which infrastructure10. Within an on-premises Further, in non-multi-layer architecture the physical infrastructure supports solution, IT managers must provision such as those modeled in the private each application and allows changes infrastructure against a homogeneous cloud, every customer requires its own or upgrades including performance peak, whereas cloud computing set of software and (virtual) hardware enhancements to be applied instantly providers are able to match diverse to be regularly and redundantly updated. across the board. This integrated peak demands against diverse average This occurs one customer at a time and approach results in a per-single watt demands by sharing its infrastructure utilizes relatively large chunks of capacity, of server productivity improvement resources across its platform. By frequently resulting in over-provisioning (i.e. fewer watts to process the same aggregating the weakly correlated of hardware and more energy information) that is instantly scaled workloads of large numbers of consumption across the system. across the entire infrastructure, achieving companies11 and leveraging the concept a significant multiplier effect in efficiency of diversity, cloud service providers are Salesforce.com’s cloud platform that reduces energy consumption, and consistently able to realize dramatically combines the aggregation of workloads is a feature not typically achieved in smaller peak-to-average ratios, which with a multitenant architecture that lets virtualized data center environments. greatly reduces the need for idle tens of thousands of organizations share Further, the multitenant environment capacity held in reserve. what is logically a single infrastructure enables the highly efficient use of the stack, and runs upon a shared version company’s hardware assets. By serving Many cloud providers utilize a of software12. Designed with the an equivalent number of transactions, multitenant approach by relocating assumption of sharing built in from salesforce.com’s cloud infrastructure the redundancy of traditional models the bottom up, salesforce.com’s stack uses a fraction of the quantity of servers into a central location; using dedicated maintains separation of customer data required per customer, per application equipment specifically allocated to and tasks at the logical layer, eliminating than that of a virtualized data center individual customers. When capacity any need for provision and management hosting or private cloud approach13. is allocated in terms of installing and of a customer’s capacity at the level of activating additional servers for a either a physical or a virtual machine. customer, server utilization rates are

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.08 Multitenancy & Code Architecture Continued..

As mentioned, additional efficiency to use. Through the use of efficient code, potential also resides in the application further supported by elastic provisioning, code and configuration. Optimized the platform can serve far more users code and configuration requires less with fewer servers than an equivalent on processing, memory utilization, and data premises solution. fetches that ultimately result in additional savings of physical consumption of As a result, salesforce.com’s physical CPU, disk, memory, and network infrastructure can be precisely targeted, devices. Above the code, salesforce.com efficiently utilized and reliably assured customers can use a variety of different of providing required performance business applications, as well as offer (regardless of customer or user type). access and portals for their customers

Figure 4: Critical features with salesforce.com’s cloud platform, *number of salesforce.com customers as of February 24, 2010

Multitenant Code and Architecture

Metadata Layer

Massive Economies of Scale: Optimized Highly Predictable Continual 92,300 Customers* Processing Efficient Load Analysis & & Storage Provisioning Balancing Improvement

Physical Layer

Energy- Micro- Optimized Standardized Higher Server Utilization Fewer Servers efficient energy Physical Layer Power Architecture Servers Management Consumption

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.09 Elastic Provisioning

With application availability and up- small percentage15. As a result, increasing scale” as salesforce.com, due to its time as top priorities in IT operations, utilization rates allows the same tasks to pre-purposed, power-up in advance infrastructure planning is typically be performed with far fewer servers. arrangement, and they typically lack conducted with a conservative mindset the comparable quantity of multiple- that fails to keep infrastructure capacity The way in which cloud services are organization, global customer close to actual demand, thus reducing provisioned and sold to the customer transactions at their disposal to enable operational efficiency. This is particularly has significant impact on the IT their server utilization to be as high true for on-premises deployments where infrastructure requirements and overall as salesforce.com. IT managers over provision hardware to energy and carbon efficiency of a absorb demand fluctuations over time, particular service. For example, the Scaled across the entire platform of thereby reducing iterative server private cloud deployment modeled in customers, salesforce.com can easily capacity adjustments which significantly this analysis was based on the move equipment and scale up or affects utilization. Web Services (AWS) platform, where down as required to match customer AWS sells computing capacity in units of performance expectations. This ability Cloud providers manage capacity a ‘Virtual Machine Instance’ (similar in a gives it an added advantage over more diligently since over-provisioning way to how on-premises deployments virtualized-only data center providers. at the cloud’s operational scale is need to be scaled), rather than by the proportionally more expensive in service delivered or capacity used by a hardware and energy costs. With customer16. This approach dramatically growing expertise in demand modeling affects the estimated carbon efficiency of and more sophisticated tools to manage the service for a particular customer, and the number of running servers, less over- affects a private cloud provider’s ability provisioning is needed to serve the same to dynamically manage its infrastructure cloud user base, with server utilization and optimize resource and energy rates of greater than 90% possible14. efficiency based on actual usage patterns.

While servers that operate at higher Salesforce.com’s multitenant structure utilization rates consume more power, and software-as-a-service model enables the increase, specifically related to a more efficient use of hardware by salesforce.com’s cloud platform, is more allowing it to predict in advance when a than offset by the performance gains given customer load will be higher and and resulting elimination of idle servers. then direct under-used server capacity For example, a server running at 5% from other hardware to process another utilization can easily consume more than customer’s transactions. Contrast this half of its peak power, whereas increasing approach to a typical private cloud where the utilization rate from 5% to 20% servers are reserved for one specific will allow the server to process four application within a single organization. times the previous load while energy Private cloud deployments are not able consumption may only increase by a to achieve the same “utilization of

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.10 Data Center Efficiency

Power Usage Effectiveness Ratio While much attention is focused (PUE) is a measure of how efficiently on what cloud computing and data a data center uses its power and has a center providers’ are doing to reduce significant impact on the overall carbon the cooling demands associated with footprint. Standardizing and measuring powering servers, another approach is average PUE across companies can to aggressively improve the efficiency of be difficult. However, the US EPA the data architecture and infrastructure released an update17 to its initial 2007 required to support services. PUE will Report to Congress18 that reported an continue to be an important metric and average industry PUE of 1.91, with most driver of IT’s carbon footprint. However, businesses averaging 1.97. While many perhaps an increased focus on a metric businesses do not have the expertise or of watts or carbon emissions per unit of ability to manage PUE beyond current useful work completed (i.e. transactions) trends, nearly all of the cloud computing would yield a different perspective on providers that own and operate data performance; rather than measuring centers are aggressively driving down the efficiency achieved in powering PUE to levels near the theoretical unnecessary or even idle servers. potential of 1.0. Salesforce.com’s specific architecture enables the very efficient use of the hardware required to operate the platform and when combined with the use of efficient data centers enables it to achieve an average PUE for its services of 1.53.

Other Considerations

In addition to the drivers described above, the analysis considers the carbon emissions footprint associated with producing, distributing, and disposing of the required IT hardware and equipment for each scenario, with the total impact depending heavily on the type of equipment used, refresh cycles, and end-of-life practices. According to the model, this footprint represents approximately 4-13% of the total carbon footprint. This is another aspect where cloud computing realizes a lower carbon footprint by requiring significantly fewer servers to support a given user base or transaction load and over the life cycle of a server and data center, this had a considerable effect.

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.11 Conclusion

Cloud services are replacing on-premises deployments for most computing needs.

As observed in this analysis, there are not suffice. Cloud providers must also clear and significant energy efficiency actively select and invest in renewable and carbon emission reduction benefits energy to power their data centers and associated with the migration of services influence policy making at the national and applications to a cloud environment. and global scale. Given the increasing Both customers and service providers proportion of energy consumption will benefit from the transition and and carbon emissions that data centers management of data and services represent, cloud providers should be a to large scale cloud environments. very influential voice. The potential of This transition will bring continual cloud computing as a transforming force improvement in the efficiency of the key in IT is evident. This study concludes that drivers that impact energy consumption cloud computing will also play a crucial and carbon emissions. Further, cloud role in the sustainability of IT; mitigating computing does have the potential to the environmental footprint positively impact our environment, but of tomorrow’s information society. focusing on energy efficiency alone will

But not all clouds are created equal.

While this study provides further upon the true potential of cloud evidence of the dramatic benefits of computing. Private clouds do not enjoy cloud computing over traditional on- the benefits of multitenancy and elastic premises deployments, it begins to provisioning, which, when combined detail the differences in carbon emissions with economies of scale, deliver a highly performance between private cloud efficient physical infrastructure. As and public cloud platforms such as corporate IT managers and sustainability those offered by salesforce.com. While leaders consider a potential move to a both offer improvements in energy cloud computing environment, a better efficiency and fewer carbon emissions understanding of these differences, in per-transaction processed and addition to the business performance per-user, private clouds, or virtualized and financial aspects is critical. data centers, fall short in delivering

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.12 Conclusion Continued

Salesforce.com – Delivering shared points of value to its customers & community.

As identified through this study, salesforce.com customers are enabling This estimate assumes that companies cloud computing, and in particular, by using its cloud platform to run their either retire or re-allocate their on salesforce.com’s cloud platform delivers businesses (estimated by comparing the premises server capacity that was measureable positive carbon efficiency equivalent on premises footprint against dedicated to the services now being benefits when compared to traditional salesforce.com’s cloud platform footprint). provided by salesforce.com. Such on premises and even virtualized data When summed together, the resulting significant savings will be possible for center deployments. As identified, estimated avoided emissions from an increasing breadth of business salesforce.com’s cloud platform 2010 equate to over 170,900 tonnes of applications as more companies embrace the benefits and opportunities afforded leverages the key design principles of CO2e, which is equivalent to avoiding a public cloud including multitenancy consumption of roughly 19.5 million by cloud-based Software, Platform and and elastic provisioning and is able to gallons of gasoline20. As the platform Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, support its entire customer base on a and community of users continues such as those currently offered by very small number of servers through to grow, a projection through 2020 salesforce.com. As public clouds, they its efficient code design and architecture. results in dramatic emissions reductions allow any corporate IT department or While this results in a very low cost of potential totaling 55 million tonnes of independent software vendor (ISV) to develop cloud-based applications and operating capital and corresponding CO2e. When salesforce.com’s customers’ carbon emissions footprint, the true cumulative carbon emissions impact run them exclusively on highly efficient environmental benefits of this platform are compared against an equivalent infrastructure, resulting in the entire IT extend directly to salesforce.com’s traditional on-premises deployment (i.e. ecosystem contributing to the potential customers and indirectly to our had they not migrated to salesforce.com) for carbon emissions reductions. broader society. the exponential savings becomes very Alternative architectures to large-scale compelling, and indicate the clear public clouds, such as virtualized data Conceptually, this may be best potential of cloud computing to broadly centers and private clouds, “community” illustrated by estimating the community- reduce global carbon emissions. clouds, and hybrid architectures are all wide impact that the 92,30019 expected to yield efficiency gains, though at a smaller scale.

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5 Annual Footprint - tonnes of CO2e (millions)

Figure 5: Estimated carbon emissions from 0 1999 2010 2020 salesforce.com’s cloud platform and traditional on-premises deployment based upon salesforce.com On Premises - tonnes of C02e footprint subscribers (1999 through 2020). Salesforce.com - tonnes of C02e footprint

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.13 Footnotes

light blue 1 Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI). SMART 6 Private Cloud Approach: Deployment 14 The Future of the Data Center; Yankee Group. 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in scenarios for each user group were based on January 2008. the Information Age. 2008. EC2 instances required to run a standard Oracle Siebel v8 build. 15 The Green Grid. Five Ways to Reduce Data 2 Cloud Computing and Sustainability: The These estimates were calculated using HP’s Center Server Power Consumption. 2008. Environmental Benefits of Moving to the August 2008 benchmark report. The baseline Cloud. Accenture & WSP. November 2010. was translated into AWS instance types and 16 Performance and Scalability Benchmark: Siebel quantities needed to handle the three CRM Release 8.0 Industry Applications in HP 3 Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI). An user-loads running Siebel Web, application, and BL460c Servers running Oracle Enterprise Assessment Methodology. 2010. database instances. A virtualized environment Linux 4.5 and Oracle 10gR2 DB on HP with dynamic load management was assumed, RX6600. An Oracle White Paper. August 4 Salesforce.com’s cloud platform: with production and programming servers 2008. salesforce.com provided a complete Bill presumed to be utilized, while redundant of Materials for the complete IT hardware disaster recovery servers are idle assumed to 17 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). used for production, programming, and be 3% of active servers. ENERGY STAR Data Center Infrastructure business continuity/ disaster recover. The Rating Development Update. 2009. maximum power draw for each device 7 Given the diversity and complexity in types was derived from online manufacture’s of transactions, but lack of a standardized 18 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). specification sheet. The actual power draw methodology to separate each type of Report to Congress on Server and Data of devices while in-use was calculated based transaction, WSP considered all transactions Center Energy Efficiency. 2007. on manufacture’s configuration tools and to require the same amount of energy load verified with observed utilization. Production upon the IT hardware to process. 19 Number of salesforce.com customers as of and programming servers are presumed to be February 24, 2011. utilized, while disaster recovery servers are idle 8 The Green Grid. Green Grid Data Center on a 1-to-1 basis. The estimated number Power Efficiency Metrics: PUE and DCiE. 2008. 20 According to the US EPA Greenhouse Gas of users and measured daily transactions were Equivalencies Calculator. provided by salesforce.com. 9 Leadership Group. Case Study: Modeling and Managing Server Power at Sun 5 On-premises Approach: An estimate of Microsystems. 2008. the number of servers that salesforce.com’s customers would need to support an 10 Multitenancy refers to a principle in software equivalent platform if they were running architecture where a single instance of the on-premise was derived from a 2010 study software runs on a server, serving multiple commissioned by salesforce.com and client organizations (tenants). performed by Nucleus Research Inc., then augmented with additional research and 11 Law of Larger Numbers. Jakob Bernoulli. ISBN subject matter expert validation from 3-938417-14-5. 2005. Accenture and Jonathan Koomey. Twenty-five salesforce.com customers were surveyed 12 Power-related advantages of cloud computing. resulting in a baseline estimate for the ratio Jonathan G. Koomey, Uptime Institute. 2010. of total users to on-premise servers for small, medium, and large customers, including 13 The small foot print of a large cloud - the data disaster recovery on a 1-to-1 basis. Server center strategy of salesforce.com. Datacenter configurations were sized from the HP and Dynamics. September 2010. Solution Advisor tool based on organization size requirements.

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.14 Appendix

Model Overview on Koomey, J. G. “Estimating Total Power derived from IEA data sets: CO2 Emissions n The comparative study quantifies the Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and from Fuel Combustion (2009 Edition), IEA, greenhouse gas (carbon emissions) impacts the World” – February 15, 2007 and the Paris, International Electricity Emission Factors from salesforce.com’s cloud platform, and GreenGrid. by Country, 1999-2002.xls, and International the estimated equivalent services provided Energy Agency, as cited by EIA for 1605b. by applications hosted on premises and in n GHG emissions included are stated as carbon n a virtualized data center environment. The dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) emissions and Power consumption of salesforce.com servers functional unit of this study a transaction take into account the 6 primary GHG was based on actual direct measurement of

associated with the services provided by gases including, CO2 (carbon dioxide), SF6 salesforce specific racks provided by third party salesforce.com, including Sales Cloud, Service (sulphur hexafluoride), CH4 (methane), N2O hosting services. Datacenter specific PUE was Cloud, Chatter, Jigsaw, Force.com Platform, (nitrous oxide), HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), also provided by these vendors. and Database.com, which are PFCs (perfluorocarbons) internet-based CRM solutions delivered n A storage consumption and network usage as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and n The study includes the use phase of the efficiency ratio were also applied based upon platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). product by the customer. While use is primary data provided by salesforce.com, and assumed to be the same rate (i.e. number referenced from secondary data from the n The carbon footprint per transaction is of transactions), the efficiency and energy EPA, Green Grid and research by Jonathan derived by dividing the total system energy consumption associated with the scenarios Koomey, PhD. consumption by the number of active users is different. and transactions for a given scenario and over n Research from the National Laboratory for a period of one year. Materials Applied Network Research (NLANR) Project n Primary materials included in the study informed the path of data transfer (from a data n A custom model was independently developed consist of servers and related network center to a business customer). for this analysis based on elements of the ISO equipment (various sizes of servers, arrays, 14046 guidelines for Life Cycle Assessment, routers, and switches) used to host databases End of Life (EOL) Processes BSI PAS 2050 Specifications for the Assessment and applications, fulfill API requests, and process n End of Life calculations include the emissions of Greenhouse gas (GHG) Emissions of web transactions. Embedded emissions from associated with decommissioning and recycling Goods and Services, and the WRI/ WBCSD physical hardware were estimated based IT equipment amortized over the 3 years. GHG Protocol, and the 2010 GeSi ICT on the weight and composition of each Enablement Tool. component which was derived from n Conservative assumption of 20% recycling and manufacture specification sheets. recovery for servers and network equipment Data was used. n Geographic: This analysis encompasses n Emissions related to the material manufacture, continuous services provided to global assembly and recovery of servers and Model Exclusions customers on a ‘follow the sun basis’; 24 networking equipment are based on a 3 year n Energy consumed during software hours, 7 days a week, 365 days per year. amortization rate for data center hardware. development. Information on the Life Cycle Inventory of n Temporal: Time period considered: January 1st servers were also derived from the following n Tertiary suppliers and process materials through December 31st 2010. Network run papers: Weber C. ‘Uncertainty and Variability in which are not significant (i.e. do not constitute time assumes 8,760 hours per year. Carbon Footprinting for Electronic: Case Study an input to 95% of the product or process). of an IBM Rack-mount Server’. Carnegie Mellon Refrigerants (except where used in primary n Primary data was provided by salesforce.com University. December 2010. production of raw inputs). and its third party data center hosting services. Process Energy for IT Infrastructure n Embedded energy of capital equipment, n Secondary data regarding virtualized n Appropriate carbon emissions factors were transportation vehicles, buildings and their data center (i.e. private cloud) assumptions was applied to the energy consumption of energy use not directly related to servers and provided by Accenture. specific data center locations from the associated equipment. U.S.EPA’s eGRID2007 Version 1.1, January 2009. n Secondary data for Materials was derived For on-premise and private cloud assumptions, n Maintenance of capital equipment. from the Eco-Invent database and other EPA eGRID US average emission factors were publicly available databases collated in SimaPro. used unless otherwise noted. n Refrigerants (except where used in the primary production of raw inputs). n Secondary server consumption data was n Emission factors for data center electricity derived from industry averages based consumption in international locations was

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.15 About About WSP Salesforce.com Environment & Energy

Salesforce.com is the enterprise WSP Environment & Energy is cloud computing company. Based on one of the world’s leading global salesforce.com’s real-time, multitenant consultancies, delivering solutions architecture, the company’s to environmental, energy, and platform and CRM applications have sustainability issues. With over 1,000 revolutionized the way companies people across 65 offices globally, collaborate and communicate with WSP Environment and Energy offers their customers. Salesforce.com a full-service consulting practice to offers the fastest path to customer a range of commercial and industrial success with cloud computing. clients, many of whom are Fortune As of February 24, 2011, 500 and FTSE 250 companies. WSP salesforce.com manages customer helps its clients increase business information for approximately performance through process 92,300 customers including Allianz improvement, risk mitigation, and Commercial, Dell, Japan Post, design and implementation of Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and sustainable business practices. WSP SunTrust Banks. Its home page is Environment & Energy is part of http://www.salesforce.com/crm WSP Group plc. Its home page is www.wspenvironmental.com/sustain

WSP authors and key contributors: Josh Whitney, Jon Taylor, Chris Kral

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Copyright © 2011 WSP Environment & Energy.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Sue Amar and George Hu of salesforce.com for sponsoring this study, as well as Tom McAvoy from Accenture and Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., Consulting Professor at Stanford University for their input, review and comments on the methodology and model.