Cloud computing is really taking off, a trend that requires more big data centers to be built. For the most part, cloud providers are doing a great job of erecting green facilities, but what if they could tweak things further?

IBM has a new patent that may help organizations extend their green initiatives to the cloud, provided that their cloud providers support it. U.S. Patent #8,549,125 describes a way of moving workloads to eco-friendly servers and other IT systems.

IBM Master Inventor Keith Walker explains in A Smarter Planet blog post:

Our patent lets companies route their requests to under-utilized servers or datacenters, or even to servers or datacenters powered by alternative energy sources. The idea is that if companies want to reduce their environmental impact, they could sign up for this option through their cloud provider.

Customers would, for instance, check off the green computing option in their dashboards as they set up their capacity and bandwidth requirements. “The cloud provider then routes the requests to the network devices, the server devices, even down to the code functions that will process that service to consume the least amount of electricity,” adds Walker.

Read more about the new patent in Walker’s blog post or IBM’s press release.

Image credit: Flickr user Beraldo Leal – CC