SALESFORCE.COM AND THE ENVIRONMENT · across salesforce.com’s existing and growing customer base). This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.03 To more rigorously assess

This report was commissioned by salesforce.com

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

03 Executive Summary

04 Introduction

05 Approach & Methodology

06 Summary of Findings

08 How does salesforce.com’s cloud platform deliverexceptionalenergyandcarbonefficiency?

12 Conclusion

14 Footnotes

15 Appendix

Executive Summary

Despite their similar labels, various “cloud computing” offerings differ greatly in their environmental impact and their potential to improve on the environmental footprint of legacy IT models.

server capacity to demand; and applies multitenancy to serve thousands of organizations with one set of shared infrastructure. Further, salesforce appears to be leading the way in designing, building and operating cloud service hubs that minimize energy use for a given amount of computing power (not only at an operational level). Further, they can employ energy-saving innovations at a scale that only the largest on premises or virtualized data center owner / operators could feasibly manage. For those few companies that do have a scale of operations appropriatetoalarge-scaletask-specificinfrastructure,thisstudyidentifiesthekey drivers that will let them optimize forthegreatestefficiencyaswell.

This study shows that there are clear andsignificantenergyandcarbonemissionreductionbenefitsassociatedwith the migration of services and applications to a cloud environment, and also details how salesforce.com’s cloud platformenablesfurtherefficienciesovera private cloud / virtualized data center deployment. While individual companies may begin to realize lowered emissions at the local scale by decommissioning their equipment and using cloud services tomoreefficientlyruntheirbusinesses,cumulative reductions in carbon emissions at the platform level signal an untappedpotentialtosignificantlyreduceglobal carbon emissions (expressed across salesforce.com’s existing and growing customer base).

P.03This report was commissioned by salesforce.com

To more rigorously assess the environmental impact of cloud computing, salesforce.com engaged WSP Environment & Energy to compare the energy use and carbon footprint of its cloud platform and services against equivalent on-premises and virtualized data center deployments.

Our analysis shows that salesforce.com’s massively scalable, multitenant cloud computing platform is substantially morecarbonefficientthaton-premisessystems or even virtualized data center deployments (also known as “private cloud”deployments).Specifically,thestudy found that:

n A salesforce.com transaction is on average95%morecarbonefficient than when processed in an equivalent on-premises deployment;

n A salesforce.com transaction is on average64%morecarbonefficient than when processed in an equivalent private cloud deployment; and

n Salesforce.com’s estimated total customer carbon emissions footprint for 2010 is at least 19 times smaller than an equivalent on- premises deployment, and is 3 times smaller than an equivalent private cloud deployment. Salesforce.com’s cloud platform enables much higher utilization of servers; uses elastic provisioning to better match

.com

Introduction

The use of IT is increasingly being positioned as a tool to realize environmental sustainability goals, allowing companies to measure, analyze, manage and report on environmental data to mitigate risk and reduce their overall impact1. At the same time, the choice of IT infrastructure and services is increasingly being seen as a component of a company’s carbon footprint that can enable control of their scaleandgrowthovertime.Specifically,cloud computing has emerged as a solution that reduces hardware requirements, provides scalability and offers direct energy and carbon emissions reductions; as well as enabling moreefficientbusinessprocesses,scalability and improved communication and collaboration.

While a previous report2 captured how cloud computing broadly offers the potential to greatly reduce the environmental impact of IT (mostly duetoitsflexible,scalablemodel),

not all cloud models are the same and there are varying degrees of efficiencywithinvarioustypesofclouds. As businesses continue to evaluate a move to the cloud, a greaterunderstandingofspecificcloudcomputing providers’ environmental performance may be another factor to consider. The degree to which businesses and, more broadly, the environment may stand to gain when choosing between on premises computing, a private cloud and a multitenant public cloud is less well known.

Commissioned by salesforce.com, WSP Environment & Energy (WSP) performed a quantitative analysis of salesforce.com’s cloud platform to compare the energy and carbon efficiencyofitsserviceoffering–withinthe context of equivalent on-premises andprivateclouddeployments–tobetter quantify the potential impact of cloud computing.


Approach & Methodology

WSP developed a quantitative model that calculates the life cycle carbon emissions of salesforce.com’s cloud platform (called Force.com), and compared the results to the equivalent services provided within an on-premises and private cloud deployment. The methodology used to develop this independent model is in line with the assessment methodology developed by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI)3 and other best practice standards.Thismodelquantifiesenergyuse and carbon emissions on a per-transaction and per-user basis and considers three deployment scenarios: on premises, private cloud and salesforce.com’s cloud platform.

Within each of the three deployment scenarios, three organizational sizes are considered: small (under 100 users), medium (under 500 users), and large (over 500 users, up to 10,000) to account for non-linear server scaling requirements. Results are expressed in terms of percentage savings in estimated carbon emissions.

The footprint of salesforce.com’s multitenant cloud platform4 was assessed by collecting energy consumption data, architecture configurationandannualtransactioninformation from the company’s data center operations as of December 31, 2010 for the preceding one year period. The on-premises5 and private cloud6 deployments were modeled based on prior research completed by WSP, with additional input and modeling recommendations from subject matter experts including Accenture and Jonathan G. Koomey, PhD., Consulting Professor at Stanford University.

The critical inputs for this analysis include:

n Users: Number of users required by the system at any given period of time.

n Transactions: Measured API and Web requests processed by the platform, per day over a one year period7.

n Server Count: Number of servers required to support the platform and business applications. This is inclusive of business continuity and disaster recovery.

n Device Utilization: Computational load that a device (server, network, or storage array) is handling relative tothespecifiedpeakload.

n Internet Transmission: Energy required for data transfer through access technologies and the internet backbone for salesforce.com’s cloud platform and private cloud environments.

n Power Consumption per type of IT hardware: Calculated energy consumed by a server at a given rate of device utilization and estimated power for networking and storage equipment.

n Embedded Energy for IT hardware: LCA estimates of embedded energy on a per-server basis.

n Data Center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE):Definedas the ratio of overall power drawn by the data center facility to the power delivered to the IT hardware. Thisisalocationspecificdatacenter efficiencymetricthataccounts for energy consumption of active cooling, power conditioning, lighting, and other critical data center infrastructure8.


On Premises: Software is purchased and provisioned on dedicated hardware by a single company. The equipment and facility is owned and operated on-site by the individual company.

Private Cloud (i.e. Virtualized Data Center): Software is licensed and provisioned on a virtualized and dedicated capacity based system to a single company by an outsourced data center service provider. The equipment and facility is owned and operated off-site by a data center service provider.

Salesforce.com’s Cloud: Software is licensed and provisioned on a shared multitenant architecture to many companies as an internet-based software-as-a-service provider. The equipment is owned and operated by the service provider the equipment is located in private suites at a data center service provider.

On-Premises 1-99 Users

Salesforce.com’sCloud Platform

On-Premises 100-499 Users On-Premises

500+ Users

Summary of Findings

The results of the analysis show that salesforce.com’s cloud platform delivers significantlylowercarbonemissions on a per-transaction and per-user basis when compared to both on-premises and private cloud deployments.

Estimated avoided carbon emissions from using salesforce.com’s cloud platform are:

n A salesforce.com transaction is on average95%morecarbonefficient than when processed in an equivalent on-premises deployment;n A salesforce.com transaction is on average64%morecarbonefficient than when processed in an equivalent private cloud deployment; and n Salesforce.com’s estimated total customer carbon emissions footprint is at least 19 times smaller than an equivalent on-premises deployment, and is 3 times smaller than an equivalent private cloud deployment.

The study focuses on a per-transaction metrictocomparetheefficiencyofeach deployment, which provides a greater depth of analysis of the inherent differencesinplatformefficiency.Withan emphasis on transactions, rather than the number of users, the methodology betterreflectsthekeyindicatorofefficiencyforacloudcomputingsolution- the number of transactions that can be processed over a period of time (not only the equivalent number of users that the solution can support). This methodology also enables a more accurate comparison of salesforce. cloud platform to a private cloud

solution which is typically sized based upon both transactions required and the number of users. Thecarbonefficiencyadvantagesthatsalesforce.com’s cloud platform offers comparedtoonpremisesissignificant.Dedicated infrastructure associated with on premises deployments typically operate at very low utilization levels and donotbenefitfromthekeyfeaturesofpublic cloud computing; multitenancy and elastic provisioning which offer scalability (both up and down) and higher utilization rates9. While a private cloud doesbenefitfromelasticprovisioningand higher utilization rates, it is clear that multitenancy is a critical driver of carbon efficiency.Asorganizationscontinuetoevaluate a potential move to the cloud, corporate IT and sustainability managers should consider these key differences across each deployment scenario which affects both business performance and environmental value.

While a per-transaction metric provides a more holistic comparison of efficiency,businesseswithon-premisessolutions are required to size their IT

Figure 1: Comparison of estimated carbon emissions of on premise, private cloud and salesforce.com’s cloud platform on a per-transaction processed basis.

Figure 2: Comparison of estimated carbon emissions of on premises by size of organization to salesforce.com’s cloud platform on a per-user processed basis.

On-Premise

Private CloudSalesforce.com’sCloud Platform

95% average estimated decrease in carbon emissions per-transaction

64% average estimated decrease in carbon emissions per-transaction

infrastructure based upon number of users. When compared at this level, the analysis found that estimated carbon emission reductions by organization size range between 50% and 90%. This indicates that while deployment size does matter, the advantage that salesforce.com’s cloud platform provides over a traditional on-premises solution remainssignificantandprovidesadditional proof points for a comparison ofcarbonefficiency.

Small: 90% estimated decrease in carbon emissions by using salesforce.com on a per-user basis

Medium: 86% estimated decrease in carbon emissions by using salesforce.com on a per-user basis

Large: 50% estimated decrease in carbon emissions by using salesforce.com on a per-user basis


.com

Case Study

Salesforce.com customers Nimbus and Altium realize significantcarbonsavingsfrom salesforce.com’s cloud platform.

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 consulting services to global clients from10officesaroundtheworldandhas been a salesforce.com customer and partner since 2004. All of the company’shumanresources,finance,marketing, sales, support, timesheets, audit, project and employee holiday tracking applications are now run on salesforce.com’s cloud platform. Similarly, Altium, a Sydney, Australia based provider of electronic design tools, recently transitioned from an on premises infrastructure to salesforce.com’s cloud platform for support of all of its CRM, purchase requisition, HR, costing / liabilities management, electronic testing, events registration and customer licensing system needs.

WSP worked with both companies to quantify the environmental value of using salesforce.com’s cloud platform by assessing the hardware, software and corresponding energy consumption

demands of the on premises system that was required to support the businesses activities as well as the added services currently provided from salesforce.com. Due to a lack of available on premises transaction data, WSP modeled the estimated savings on a per-user basis.

In the case of Nimbus, by retiring their on premises equipment and fully moving to salesforce.com’s cloud platform, the realized emissions reductions achieved are roughly in line with the estimates projected in the study on a per-user basis.

“We used salesforce.com’s cloud platform to reduce our IT carbon emissions by 95% over our previous on premises system,” stated Ian Gotts, CEO, Nimbus.

“Our transition to salesforce.com enabled the retirement of a significantportionofour on premises IT hardware infrastructure”, Alan Perkins, CIO, Altium. “The result is an estimated 80% reduction in the energy and carbon footprint per user.”

Figure 3: Comparison of estimated avoided carbon emissions for an on premises medium sized business (100-499 users), Altium’s estimated avoided emissions and salesforce.com’s cloud platform footprint on a per-user basis.

Medium On-Premises

AltiumSalesforce.com’sCloud Platform

86% estimated decrease in carbon emissions per-user

80% estimated decrease in carbon emissions 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 carbonefficiencyperformancethatitenables as compared to on premises oraprivatecloud.Specifically,themultitenancy 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 theenergyandcarbonefficiencyincludeElastic Provisioning and Data Center Efficiency(typicallyexpressedasPUE).

Multitenancy & Code Architecture

Cloudcomputingisdefinedbymanyauthorities as serving multiple customers simultaneously with a shared server infrastructure10. Within an on-premises solution, IT managers must provision infrastructure against a homogeneous peak, whereas cloud computing providers are able to match diverse peak demands against diverse average demands by sharing its infrastructure resources across its platform. By aggregating the weakly correlated workloads of large numbers of companies11 and leveraging the concept of diversity, cloud service providers are consistently able to realize dramatically smaller peak-to-average ratios, which greatly reduces the need for idle capacity held in reserve.

Many cloud providers utilize a multitenant approach by relocating the redundancy of traditional models into a central location; using dedicated equipmentspecificallyallocatedtoindividual customers. When capacity is allocated in terms of installing and activating additional servers for a customer, server utilization rates are

effectively lower than in the multitenant model that allocates server processing cycles–notserverhardwareunits.Further, in non-multi-layer architecture such as those modeled in the private cloud, every customer requires its own set of software and (virtual) hardware to be regularly and redundantly updated. This occurs one customer at a time and utilizes relatively large chunks of capacity, frequently resulting in over-provisioning of hardware and more energy consumption across the system.

Salesforce.com’s cloud platform combines the aggregation of workloads with a multitenant architecture that lets tens of thousands of organizations share what is logically a single infrastructure stack, and runs upon a shared version of software12. Designed with the assumption of sharing built in from the bottom up, salesforce.com’s stack maintains separation of customer data and tasks at the logical layer, eliminating any need for provision and management of a customer’s capacity at the level of either a physical or a virtual machine.

As the salesforce.com community of users grows, the platform design can efficientlymanagethewayinwhichthe physical infrastructure supports each application and allows changes or upgrades including performance enhancements to be applied instantly across the board. This integrated approach results in a per-single watt of server productivity improvement (i.e. fewer watts to process the same information) that is instantly scaled across the entire infrastructure, achieving asignificantmultipliereffectinefficiencythat reduces energy consumption, and is a feature not typically achieved in virtualized data center environments. Further, the multitenant environment enablesthehighlyefficientuseofthecompany’s hardware assets. By serving an equivalent number of transactions, salesforce.com’s cloud infrastructure uses a fraction of the quantity of servers required per customer, per application than that of a virtualized data center hosting or private cloud approach13.


Asmentioned,additionalefficiencypotential also resides in the application codeandconfiguration.Optimizedcodeandconfigurationrequireslessprocessing, memory utilization, and data fetches that ultimately result in additional savings of physical consumption of CPU, disk, memory, and network devices. Above the code, salesforce.com customers can use a variety of different business applications, as well as offer 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

touse.Throughtheuseofefficientcode,further supported by elastic provisioning, the platform can serve far more users with fewer servers than an equivalent on premises solution.

As a result, salesforce.com’s physical infrastructure can be precisely targeted, efficientlyutilizedandreliablyassuredof providing required performance (regardless of customer or user type).

Multitenancy & Code ArchitectureContinued..

Multitenant Code and Architecture

Metadata Layer

Physical Layer

Massive Economies of Scale:92,300 Customers*

Higher Server UtilizationFewer Servers


Physical Layer

Energy-efficientServers

Micro-energy

Management

Optimized Power

Consumption

Standardized Architecture

Optimized Processing & Storage

Highly Efficient

Provisioning

Predictable Load

Balancing

ContinualAnalysis &

Improvement

Elastic Provisioning

With application availability and up-time as top priorities in IT operations, infrastructure planning is typically conducted with a conservative mindset that fails to keep infrastructure capacity close to actual demand, thus reducing operationalefficiency.Thisisparticularlytrue for on-premises deployments where IT managers over provision hardware to absorbdemandfluctuationsovertime,thereby reducing iterative server capacityadjustmentswhichsignificantlyaffects utilization.

Cloud providers manage capacity more diligently since over-provisioning at the cloud’s operational scale is proportionally more expensive in hardware and energy costs. With growing expertise in demand modeling and more sophisticated tools to manage the number of running servers, less over-provisioning is needed to serve the same cloud user base, with server utilization rates of greater than 90% possible14.

While servers that operate at higher utilization rates consume more power, theincrease,specificallyrelatedtosalesforce.com’s cloud platform, is more than offset by the performance gains and resulting elimination of idle servers. For example, a server running at 5% utilization can easily consume more than half of its peak power, whereas increasing the utilization rate from 5% to 20% will allow the server to process four times the previous load while energy consumption may only increase by a

small percentage15. As a result, increasing utilization rates allows the same tasks to be performed with far fewer servers.

The way in which cloud services are provisioned and sold to the customer hassignificantimpactontheITinfrastructure requirements and overall energyandcarbonefficiencyofaparticular service. For example, the private cloud deployment modeled in this analysis was based on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, where AWS sells computing capacity in units of a ‘Virtual Machine Instance’ (similar in a way to how on-premises deployments need to be scaled), rather than by the service delivered or capacity used by a customer16. This approach dramatically affectstheestimatedcarbonefficiencyofthe service for a particular customer, and affects a private cloud provider’s ability to dynamically manage its infrastructure and optimize resource and energy efficiencybasedonactualusagepatterns.

Salesforce.com’s multitenant structure and software-as-a-service model enables amoreefficientuseofhardwarebyallowing it to predict in advance when a given customer load will be higher and then direct under-used server capacity from other hardware to process another customer’s transactions. Contrast this approach to a typical private cloud where serversarereservedforonespecificapplication within a single organization. Private cloud deployments are not able to achieve the same “utilization of


scale” as salesforce.com, due to its pre-purposed, power-up in advance arrangement, and they typically lack the comparable quantity of multiple-organization, global customer transactions at their disposal to enable their server utilization to be as high as salesforce.com.

Scaled across the entire platform of customers, salesforce.com can easily move equipment and scale up or down as required to match customer performance expectations. This ability gives it an added advantage over virtualized-only data center providers.

Data Center Efficiency

Power Usage Effectiveness Ratio (PUE)isameasureofhowefficientlya data center uses its power and has a significantimpactontheoverallcarbonfootprint. Standardizing and measuring average PUE across companies can bedifficult.However,theUSEPAreleased an update17 to its initial 2007 Report to Congress18 that reported an average industry PUE of 1.91, with most businesses averaging 1.97. While many businesses do not have the expertise or ability to manage PUE beyond current trends, nearly all of the cloud computing providers that own and operate data centers are aggressively driving down PUE to levels near the theoretical potentialof1.0.Salesforce.com’sspecificarchitectureenablestheveryefficientuse of the hardware required to operate the platform and when combined with theuseofefficientdatacentersenablesit 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 footprintbyrequiringsignificantlyfewerservers 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.

While much attention is focused on what cloud computing and data center providers’ are doing to reduce the cooling demands associated with powering servers, another approach is toaggressivelyimprovetheefficiencyofthe data architecture and infrastructure required to support services. PUE will continue to be an important metric and driver of IT’s carbon footprint. However, perhaps an increased focus on a metric of watts or carbon emissions per unit of useful work completed (i.e. transactions) would yield a different perspective on performance; rather than measuring theefficiencyachievedinpoweringunnecessary or even idle servers.


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

As observed in this analysis, there are clearandsignificantenergyefficiencyandcarbonemissionreductionbenefitsassociated with the migration of services and applications to a cloud environment. Both customers and service providers willbenefitfromthetransitionandmanagement of data and services to large scale cloud environments. This transition will bring continual improvementintheefficiencyofthekeydrivers that impact energy consumption and carbon emissions. Further, cloud computing does have the potential to positively impact our environment, but focusingonenergyefficiencyalonewill

notsuffice.Cloudprovidersmustalsoactively select and invest in renewable energy to power their data centers and influencepolicymakingatthenationaland global scale. Given the increasing proportion of energy consumption and carbon emissions that data centers represent, cloud providers should be a veryinfluentialvoice.Thepotentialofcloud computing as a transforming force in IT is evident. This study concludes that cloud computing will also play a crucial role in the sustainability of IT; mitigating the environmental footprint of tomorrow’s information society.


But not all clouds are created equal.

While this study provides further evidenceofthedramaticbenefitsofcloud computing over traditional on-premises deployments, it begins to detail the differences in carbon emissions performance between private cloud and public cloud platforms such as those offered by salesforce.com. While both offer improvements in energy efficiencyandfewercarbonemissionsper-transaction processed and per-user, private clouds, or virtualized data centers, fall short in delivering

upon the true potential of cloud computing. Private clouds do not enjoy thebenefitsofmultitenancyandelasticprovisioning, which, when combined with economies of scale, deliver a highly efficientphysicalinfrastructure.Ascorporate IT managers and sustainability leaders consider a potential move to a cloud computing environment, a better understanding of these differences, in addition to the business performance andfinancialaspectsiscritical.

Conclusion

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

Asidentifiedthroughthisstudy,cloud computing, and in particular, salesforce.com’s cloud platform delivers measureablepositivecarbonefficiencybenefitswhencomparedtotraditionalon premises and even virtualized data centerdeployments.Asidentified,salesforce.com’s cloud platform leverages the key design principles of a public cloud including multitenancy and elastic provisioning and is able to support its entire customer base on a very small number of servers through itsefficientcodedesignandarchitecture.While this results in a very low cost of operating capital and corresponding carbon emissions footprint, the true environmentalbenefitsofthisplatformextend directly to salesforce.com’s customers and indirectly to our broader society.

Conceptually, this may be best illustrated by estimating the community-wide impact that the 92,30019

salesforce.com customers are enabling by using its cloud platform to run their businesses (estimated by comparing the equivalent on premises footprint against salesforce.com’s cloud platform footprint). When summed together, the resulting estimated avoided emissions from 2010 equate to over 170,900 tonnes of CO2e, which is equivalent to avoiding consumption of roughly 19.5 million gallons of gasoline20. As the platform and community of users continues to grow, a projection through 2020 results in dramatic emissions reductions potential totaling 55 million tonnes of CO2e. When salesforce.com’s customers’ cumulative carbon emissions impact are compared against an equivalent traditional on-premises deployment (i.e. had they not migrated to salesforce.the exponential savings becomes very compelling, and indicate the clear potential of cloud computing to broadly reduce global carbon emissions.

This estimate assumes that companies either retire or re-allocate their on premises server capacity that was dedicated to the services now being provided by salesforce.com. Such significantsavingswillbepossibleforan increasing breadth of business applications as more companies embrace thebenefitsandopportunitiesaffordedby cloud-based Software, Platform and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, such as those currently offered by salesforce.com. As public clouds, they allow any corporate IT department or independent software vendor (ISV) to develop cloud-based applications and runthemexclusivelyonhighlyefficientinfrastructure, resulting in the entire IT ecosystem contributing to the potential for carbon emissions reductions. Alternative architectures to large-scale public clouds, such as virtualized data centers and private clouds, “community” clouds, and hybrid architectures are all expectedtoyieldefficiencygains,thoughat a smaller scale.


Figure 5: Estimated carbon emissions from salesforce.com’s cloud platform and traditional on-premises deployment based upon salesforce.com subscribers (1999 through 2020).

Ann

ual F

ootp

rint -

tonn

es o

f CO

2e (

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On Premises - tonnes of C02e footprintSalesforce.com - tonnes of C02e footprint

1999 2020

5

10

15

20

25

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Continued

com)

Footnotes

1 Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI). SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age. 2008.

2 Cloud Computing and Sustainability: The EnvironmentalBenefitsofMovingtothe Cloud. Accenture & WSP. November 2010.

3 Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI). An Assessment Methodology. 2010.

4 Salesforce.com’s cloud platform: salesforce.com provided a complete Bill of Materials for the complete IT hardware used for production, programming, and business continuity/ disaster recover. The maximum power draw for each device was derived from online manufacture’s specificationsheet.Theactualpowerdraw of devices while in-use was calculated based onmanufacture’sconfigurationtoolsand verifiedwithobservedutilization.Production and programming servers are presumed to be utilized, while disaster recovery servers are idle on a 1-to-1 basis. The estimated number of users and measured daily transactions were provided by salesforce.com.

5 On-premises Approach: An estimate of the number of servers that salesforce.com’s customers would need to support an equivalent platform if they were running on-premise was derived from a 2010 study commissioned by salesforce.com and performed by Nucleus Research Inc., then augmented with additional research and subject matter expert validation from AccentureandJonathanKoomey.Twenty-five salesforce.com customers were surveyed resulting in a baseline estimate for the ratio of total users to on-premise servers for small, medium, and large customers, including disaster recovery on a 1-to-1 basis. Server configurationsweresizedfromtheHPand Dell Solution Advisor tool based on organization size requirements.

6 Private Cloud Approach: Deployment scenarios for each user group were based on Amazon Web Services EC2 instances required to run a standard Oracle Siebel v8 build. These estimates were calculated using HP’s August 2008 benchmark report. The baseline was translated into AWS instance types and quantities needed to handle the three user-loads running Siebel Web, application, and database instances. A virtualized environment with dynamic load management was assumed, with production and programming servers presumed to be utilized, while redundant disaster recovery servers are idle assumed to be 3% of active servers.

7 Given the diversity and complexity in types of transactions, but lack of a standardized methodology to separate each type of transaction, WSP considered all transactions to require the same amount of energy load upon the IT hardware to process.

8 The Green Grid. Green Grid Data Center PowerEfficiencyMetrics:PUEandDCiE.2008.

9 Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Case Study: Modeling and Managing Server Power at Sun Microsystems. 2008.

10 Multitenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client organizations (tenants).

11 Law of Larger Numbers. Jakob Bernoulli. ISBN 3-938417-14-5. 2005.

12 Power-related advantages of cloud computing. Jonathan G. Koomey, Uptime Institute. 2010.

13 The small foot print of a large cloud - the data center strategy of salesforce.com. Datacenter Dynamics. September 2010.

14 The Future of the Data Center; Yankee Group. January 2008.

15 The Green Grid. Five Ways to Reduce Data Center Server Power Consumption. 2008.

16 Performance and Scalability Benchmark: Siebel CRM Release 8.0 Industry Applications in HP BL460c Servers running Oracle Enterprise

Linux 4.5 and Oracle 10gR2 DB on HP RX6600. An Oracle White Paper. August 2008.

17 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ENERGY STAR Data Center Infrastructure Rating Development Update. 2009.

18 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Report to Congress on Server and Data CenterEnergyEfficiency.2007.

19 Number of salesforce.com customers as of February 24, 2011.

20 According to the US EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator.


light blue

Appendix

Model Overviewn Thecomparativestudyquantifiesthe

greenhouse gas (carbon emissions) impacts from salesforce.com’s cloud platform, and the estimated equivalent services provided by applications hosted on premises and in a virtualized data center environment. The functional unit of this study a transaction associated with the services provided by salesforce.com, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter, Jigsaw, Force.com Platform, Heroku and Database.com, which are internet-based CRM solutions delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

n The carbon footprint per transaction is derived by dividing the total system energy consumption by the number of active users and transactions for a given scenario and over a period of one year.

n A custom model was independently developed for this analysis based on elements of the ISO 14046 guidelines for Life Cycle Assessment, BSIPAS2050SpecificationsfortheAssessmentof Greenhouse gas (GHG) Emissions of Goods and Services, and the WRI/ WBCSD GHG Protocol, and the 2010 GeSi ICT Enablement Tool.

Datan Geographic: This analysis encompasses continuous services provided to global customers on a ‘follow the sun basis’; 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days per year.

n Temporal: Time period considered: January 1st through December 31st 2010. Network run time assumes 8,760 hours per year.

n Primary data was provided by salesforce.com and its third party data center hosting services.

n Secondary data regarding virtualized data center (i.e. private cloud) assumptions was provided by Accenture.

n Secondary data for Materials was derived from the Eco-Invent database and other publicly available databases collated in SimaPro. n Secondary server consumption data was derived from industry averages based

on Koomey, J. G. “Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and theWorld”–February15,2007andthe GreenGrid.

n GHG emissions included are stated as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) emissions and take into account the 6 primary GHG gases including, CO2 (carbon dioxide), SF6 (sulphurhexafluoride),CH4 (methane), N2O (nitrousoxide),HFCs(hydrofluorocarbons), PFCs(perfluorocarbons)

n The study includes the use phase of the product by the customer. While use is assumed to be the same rate (i.e. number oftransactions),theefficiencyandenergy consumption associated with the scenarios is different.

Materialsn Primary materials included in the study consist of servers and related network equipment (various sizes of servers, arrays, routers, and switches) used to host databases andapplications,fulfillAPIrequests,andprocess web transactions. Embedded emissions from physical hardware were estimated based on the weight and composition of each component which was derived from manufacturespecificationsheets.

n Emissions related to the material manufacture, assembly and recovery of servers and networking equipment are based on a 3 year amortization rate for data center hardware. Information on the Life Cycle Inventory of servers were also derived from the following papers: Weber C. ‘Uncertainty and Variability in Carbon Footprinting for Electronic: Case Study of an IBM Rack-mount Server’. Carnegie Mellon University. December 2010.

Process Energy for IT Infrastructuren Appropriate carbon emissions factors were applied to the energy consumption of specificdatacenterlocationsfromthe U.S.EPA’s eGRID2007 Version 1.1, January 2009. For on-premise and private cloud assumptions, EPA eGRID US average emission factors were used unless otherwise noted.

n Emission factors for data center electricity consumption in international locations was

derived from IEA data sets: CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion (2009 Edition), IEA, Paris, International Electricity Emission Factors by Country, 1999-2002.xls, and International Energy Agency, as cited by EIA for 1605b.

n Power consumption of salesforce.com servers was based on actual direct measurement of salesforcespecificracksprovidedbythirdparty hostingservices.DatacenterspecificPUEwas also provided by these vendors.

n A storage consumption and network usage efficiencyratiowerealsoappliedbasedupon primary data provided by salesforce.com, and referenced from secondary data from the EPA, Green Grid and research by Jonathan Koomey, PhD.

n Research from the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) Project informed the path of data transfer (from a data center to a business customer).

End of Life (EOL) Processesn End of Life calculations include the emissions associated with decommissioning and recycling IT equipment amortized over the 3 years.

n Conservative assumption of 20% recycling and recovery for servers and network equipment was used.

Model Exclusionsn Energy consumed during software development.

n Tertiary suppliers and process materials whicharenotsignificant(i.e.donotconstitute an input to 95% of the product or process). Refrigerants (except where used in primary production of raw inputs).

n Embedded energy of capital equipment, transportation vehicles, buildings and their energy use not directly related to servers and associated equipment.

n Maintenance of capital equipment.

n Refrigerants (except where used in the primary production of raw inputs).


About Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. Based on salesforce.com’s real-time, multitenant architecture, the company’s platform and CRM applications have revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate with their customers. Salesforce.com offers the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing. As of February 24, 2011, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 92,300 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks. Its home page is http://www.salesforce.com/crm

About WSP Environment & Energy

WSP Environment & Energy is one of the world’s leading global consultancies, delivering solutions to environmental, energy, and sustainability issues. With over 1,000 peopleacross65officesglobally,WSP Environment and Energy offers a full-service consulting practice to a range of commercial and industrial clients, many of whom are Fortune 500 and FTSE 250 companies. WSP helps its clients increase business performance through process improvement, risk mitigation, and design and implementation of sustainable business practices. WSP Environment & Energy is part of WSP Group plc. Its home page is www.wspenvironmental.com/sustain

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

This document makes reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by WSP and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between WSP and the lawful owners of such trademarks.

Copyright © 2011 WSP Environment & Energy.

AcknowledgementsThe 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.

Documents

SALESFORCE.COM AND THE ENVIRONMENT · across salesforce.com’s existing and growing customer base). This report was commissioned by salesforce.com P.03 To more rigorously assess