Cliff Saran
cliff.saran@rbi.co.uk
Innovative IT departments are turning to environmentally
friendly technology such as wood chips and methane to power data
centres.
BMW is two years into a three-year
green IT programme which has so far helped it halve its data centre
electricity costs. "We take into account any renewable energy
resources we can use in our datacentres." said Bennie Vorster,
vice-president of the BMW group.
In Munich, BMW is taking ground water from the city council to
cool the datacentre. BMW pumps the warmed water back into the mains
water system, heating up the mains water coming out of household
taps in winter. In South Carolina, BMW is using gas from a waste
dump to generate electricity to power its datacentre
Like many companies,
BMW is using shared services datacentres rather than having
each region running its own datacentre servers, to cut energy
consumption.
Other companies are encouraging programmers to write more
efficient software. This means less computational power, and fewer
server resources which leads to lower electricity consumption.
In another innovative move, the IT department at investment bank
Lehman Brothers has decided to
charge business departments based on the power consumption of the
applications they use.
"We cannot have a model of IT for infinite power consumption,
said Michael Fahy, head of IT infrastructure Europe at Lehman
Brothers, based in Canary Wharf, London.
The bank previously charged back applications based on the
amount of datacentre floor space required to run them. "We have
moved to a model where applications are charged based on the net
power consumption of the storage and servers they require." he
said.
Rackspace Hosting, a
provider of IT hosting services, has built a green data centre in
Slough, Berkshire,
The data centre will draw power from a combined heat and power
plant located on the same trading estate, which burns wood chips,
waste paper and fibre fuel to generate electricity, hot water and
steam.The plant, run by
Scottish
and Southern Energy, is the UK's largest dedicated bio-mass
energy plant.
Rackspace has begun installing servers in the data centre, which
is due to go live in June
Dale Vile, managing director at analyst group
Freeform Dynamics,
said, "Lehman Brothers' chargeback mechanism looks like a very
original approach." he said. "The more you can make sustainability
partof the day-to-day processes of the business, the better."
"However, power is not the only cost and charging needs to take
into account staff and the type of architecture, such as PC servers
and mainframes," he said.
BMW makes green savings
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