Geoff Lane, partner,
sustainable business solutions at accounting and consulting firm
PriceWaterhouse Coopers and former head of environmental policy at the Confederation of British Industry,
reports that more clients are seeking advice on how to benchmark their
green activity. "Companies regularly come to us and say, 'We have
recycling programmes or duplex printing policies in place but we want
to raise our game'."
The trend is pronounced in the public
sector with the government promoting green citizenship in the hope that
other sectors will follow suit.
A fresh focus for IT departments in all organisations is how to green the datacentre.
Computing power per square foot may have increased with the use of
multicore chips and blades, but this concentration of hardware also
generates more heat and the problem of how to dissipate it.
According
to analyst firm Gartner, most large enterprises' IT departments spend
about 5% of their total IT budgets on energy, and this could rise by
two to three times within the next five years.
One of the ways
to decrease power consumption is to better integrate facilities teams
and engineers with the IT department. "The typical engineer does not
look past the power supply or the gateway to the IT piece," says
Patrick Fogarty, director of consultant engineering practice, Norman
Disney and Young, and a speaker at Datacenter Dynamics' Next Big
Datacentre Challenge energy summit in London in February.
Similarly,
the IT team is predisposed to grab at all available power to keep its
applications running, according to several delegates at the summit.
"If
we could do it all over again without the legacy datacentre
architecture, we would take a more holistic view. From the CPU to the
actual transmission, there are a lot of inefficiencies leaked through
cabling, plus the massive inefficiencies in the ways we cool IT," says
Fogarty.
CIOs and their staff in many organisations are turning their gaze to the datacentre to try to plug these leaks.
"One
of the biggest issues around power consumption in IT is the
datacentre," says Ben Booth, global chief technology officer at
research firm Ipsos. Ipsos has datacentres scattered around the globe,
ranging from vast server farms to machines stuffed into back offices.
Booth is reviewing ways to consolidate these in order to reduce the
bill, reduce numbers and provide a round-the-clock service to
customers.
Rackspace plans a green datacentre >>
Metrics needed for green datacentre >>
US Environment Protection Agency introduces a green rating for datacentres >>
Case study: HSBC
Global banking and financial services firm HSBC has been carbon neutral since October 2005. It achieves this through energy efficiency measures and green procurement, as well as offsetting.
Ensuring
that its datacentres are efficient is a big part of HSBC's carbon
neutral status. According to Matthew Robinson, manager of the
sustainable development team, one way to improve on efficiencies is to
ensure IT teams, engineers and facilities management meet regularly.
One
design choice at HSBC that has had a significant saving has been to use
water-cooled chillers instead of packaged air coolers. The former
rejects heat to a cooler temperature and is more efficient. This alone
has gained energy savings of 29% in the datacentre, says Robinson.
The
drive to green the datacentre comes from employees and stakeholders.
"While the bottom line is never far from senior management's lips,
there is a green agenda too," he says.
This is confirmed by
Ken Harvey, group CIO of HSBC. "As the price of oil has hit the roof,
the cost of powering datacentres has become something IT directors can
no longer ignore. Green is not just a nicety careful power management
will actually help businesses save money."
HSBC's green policies >>
History and analysis: oil prices >>
Case study: Betfair
Online
betting exchange Betfair redesigned the front end of its server
architecture for a greener, less power-hungry model. Hard figures were
a large part of the decision as energy prices were increasing.
"The
cost factor kicked in last year when our co-location provider became
constrained by the amount of energy it could deliver, given the trend
to higher density, power-hungry racks," says Rorie Devine, chief
technology officer.
Betfair chose not to go down the route of
consuming ever bigger amounts of power. "We decided to implement
technology that would enable us to use less power," Devine says.
The
main route to reducing power consumption was to review the chip
technology and server architecture powering its 60 Solaris databases.
As
a result, Betfair switched from Intel Xeon chips to AMD Opteron chips
and replaced Dell servers with Sun servers. This cut power requirements
by 50%. By adopting Sun's Ultrasparc T1 processor with "Coolthreads"
denser chip technology, Betfair reduced the 16kW of power needed to run
its database servers to 3kW.
The IT department noticed a triple
benefit. "There was more power from the racks. We drew less energy,
with the extra benefit that because the servers expended less energy
and heat, we also spent less energy cooling them."
Betfair is
seeking further power reduction through server virtualisation. "We want
to extract the maximum value from the fewest machines and this has
already led to a power saving to date of 84% in this area," says Devine.
Betfair IT management >>
Betfair website >>
Case study: Basingstoke and Deane
Simon
Wilkin has been dubbed the green guerrilla at his workplaces. As client
services manager at Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council he instigated
policies that saved 1.5 million pieces of paper from reaching the
landfill. He has since taken his sustainability efforts to the Avon and
Somerset Police in his new role as services support manager.
Key
to achieving these eco results was having a sound financial case. "It
is a disaster to come over as a tree hugger," he says. It also helps if
initiatives are part of a sustainability effort, because they are less
likely to be perceived as a diktat from the IT department.
Paper
was an early focus at Basingstoke and Deane, "But it is by no means the
whole picture," says Wilkin. He was prompted into action by the sight
of huge bins of recycled paper being lugged across the floor by the
cleaners every night. "Paper consumption was big in the organisation
and recycling was not the answer."
Having a sensible hardware strategy was a part of the solution, and Wilkin implemented Kyocera models as older less eco-friendly printers
were retired. Unlike traditional printers where the entire cartridge,
including the print drum, is regularly replaced, Kyocera models use a
long-life drum.
"The capital outlay of the printers is the
same but the printer 'consumables' are half the price," Wilkin says.
And this is no small saving: at his new workplace of Avon and Somerset
Police, printer consumables cost £750,000 last year.
Wilkin also
realised he had to change people's behaviour at the council, as well as
make printers devour less paper and toner parts.
The lifecycle
of a piece of paper is frighteningly short and the council launched
intranets where staff could publish documents they wanted to share.
Additionally, every meeting room was equipped with a plasma screen so that documents could be shared and seen at meetings.
Other
green practices were introduced by the sustainability committee. This
included the controversial move of banning individual waste bins from
beneath people's desks and removing recycling bins that had been placed
at the side of the printers.
"There was a hue and cry at the
move," says Wilkin, but it was justified on finance grounds. "It made
the cleaning contract more straightforward and cheaper."
Kyocera printer products >>
Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council website >>
Case study: Kingston College
Kingston College
invested in environmentally friendly, "quiet" PCs to cut down on its
energy bill, but has been pleasantly surprised by other benefits to the
learning environment.
"They are exceptionally quiet and produce
less heat", says Nader Moghaddam, head of IT systems at Kingston. In a
room of 30 or so lively students, these quieter, cooler desktop devices
are more conducive to concentration and comfortable learning, a facet
that teachers really appreciate.
To date, 200 Ecoquiet
"whisper quiet" PCs have been installed on a replacement basis as
legacy desktops are retired. RM, supplier of the Ecoquiet range, says
they consume just 66% of the energy of the conventional design.
According to the supplier's savings calculator, Kingston College will
save 94,864kW of electricity and £8,537.72 over three years.
Moghaddam
says it is hard to pin down precisely the cost saving contributed by
the Ecoquiet PCs, which are still being rolled out.
"They are
wrapped up with other green initiatives, introduced more recently,
including the centralised powering down of all PCs, every night at
10pm," he says.
Ecoquiet product range>>
Kingston College website >>
Read the original article: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/05/01/223485/how-green-it-delivers-big-energy-savings.htm
Get Informed 
