Peer enterprises: A viable alternative to Cloud computing?

Cloud computing has emerged as an exciting new computing paradigm offering organizations and businesses the flexibility of scaling their compute resource usage, without having to worry about under or over-provisioning. It also enables services to be deployed and utilized in a seamless manner facilitating new developments in the pay-per-use domain by incorporating elements of utility computing and software-as-a-service. While organizations, researchers and application developers vigorously espouse the virtues of the ¿Cloud¿ amidst much fanfare, there is an urgent need to examine the environmental impact of the Cloud. As large organizations race to create their million-server warehouses and necessary compute infrastructure to become to early dominators in the cloud market, their high energy consumption and overall environmental impact cannot be neglected. This research paper presents the concept of Peer Enterprises - organizations which share their under-utilized resources by participating in a mammoth Peer-to-Peer network, potentially offering the same computing power as the Cloud, but without requiring additional investment or adversely impacting the environment. We present the case that if the already provisioned yet under-utilized compute resources across the world can be leveraged, a computing infrastructure comparable to the envisaged Cloud can be created, minus the negative impact on the environment.