Large corporations are moving away from piecemeal green
activities and are adopting
broader strategies to cope with the environmental issues that
affect their business. For the IT director this
means less work on isolated green "hobbies", and more joined-up
thinking with peers to create sustainable policies.
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 client services manager at Basingstoke and Deane
Borough Council 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 >>
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