Today's large companies that operate IT systems distributed over wide geographical areas have developed infrastructure that enables cloud computing. A new study, published by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student, suggests that the same infrastructure can and should also be leveraged to take advantage of geographic and temporal fluctuations in energy prices.

Asfandyar Qureshi, who is working on a doctorate at MIT, and a team of associates analyzed 39 months of hourly electricity prices from 29 locations in the U.S. To estimate the amount of savings organizations can expect from implementation of such dynamic IT load distribution, the team looked at 24 days of request traffic data for each Akamai server cluster in a commercial data center in the country. Akamai - a Cambridge, Mass.-based Internet content delivery and application provider - provided request traffic data for the study.

Two observations are at the base of Qureshi's argument: energy prices in the U.S. vary dramatically on an hourly basis and existing distributed systems already deploy dynamic request routing for purposes of fault tolerance and good performance. In addition, many of the existing distributed systems are already capable of replicating data for processing requests at multiple locations.

The study suggests that organizations can save 2-45 percent of their energy costs by constantly moving IT load to different locations according to price fluctuations. The amount of savings depends on bandwidth costs, client performance levels, energy elasticity and room for greater client-server distances.

Qureshi shows that at least a two-percent reduction in energy cost can be achieved by implementing his proposed strategy without associated increases in bandwidth cost or reduction in climate performance. "Relaxed bandwidth constraints," in combination with energy elasticity can allow for more than 30 percent savings on energy cost. The study defines energy elasticity as "the degree to which the energy consumed by a cluster depends on the load placed on it."