Datacenter vs Serverhallar : Hur hållbart är molnbaserade lösningar?

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines the life cycles of a data centre and a local server to conclude which of them has the largest environmental impact. Data centres are warehouse-looking buildings with servers in them, hosting the so-called “cloud”. Storing your data and information in a data centre and using its software and other resources through the internet is called cloud computing. The more traditional alternative to cloud computing is to have your own servers locally. You can access these without the internet, but you must operate and service it by yourself. There are some benefits with using cloud computing instead of local servers. One of these is often said to be energy efficiency and by that less environmental impact. This thesis sets out to confirm or refute, that statement. To do that, a comparing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been done. A comparing LCA is a method to compare two similar systems and how much environmental impact they both have had during their lifetime. To assess this the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents emissions per the number of virtual machines has been used as a functional unit. The assessment was made on a hypothetical data centre and a hypothetical local server. The results showed that the local server had around 9.5 more carbon dioxide emissions per virtual machine than the data centre which confirms that the data centre has the lesser environmental impact of the two. This was mostly because of a more efficient use of the servers and the fact that a data centre has the possibility to recover some of its waste heat.