SALESFORCE.COM AND THE ENVIRONMENT: Reducing Carbon Emissions in the Cloud 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 “cloud computing” 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 data center 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 Internet Transmission: Energy standards. This model quantifies energy recommendations from subject matter required for data transfer through use and carbon emissions on a experts including Accenture 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 Software 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 8 center infrastructure . 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