Green IT has been a
popular discussion in IT circles this year, and it may once have
been a nice-to-have on the IT director's list of options. According
to some, however, it's now being mandated as part of a wider
corporate strategy. So what is the industry doing to help IT
departments reach their targets?
"I'm seeing a massive shift," says Osca St Marthe, managing
consultant at systems integrator
Morse. As IT
departments are held more accountable for their expenditure, they
can't focus purely on metrics such as uptime any more, he warns.
Power and cooling, and the economic drivers behind them, are
becoming more than just fashionable - they're becoming vital.
"There is a personal responsibility that wasn't there before," St
Marthe warns. "Regulations, coupled with rising energy costs, mean
that IT departments can no longer simply sit there and do
nothing."
Green enhancements touch all parts of the IT infrastructure, but
for Climate
Savers, it starts at the edge of the network with the boxes
that employees are using. The initiative, started by Intel and
Google last year, is trying to turn this part of the computing
infrastructure green from the inside out.
"One focal point for us is driving the design of computers to be
more efficient, and we're primarily targeting power supplies, which
are very large consumers of electricity," says Allyson Klein, who
manages the server technology and software strategy team within
Intel's Server Platform Group, and who is a spokesperson for
Climate Savers.
Converting power
Today's desktop systems waste about half their energy through
converting power for use by the motherboard, Klein says. Generous
estimates suggest that today's systems ship with a 70% efficient
power supply. "We want to raise that up to 80%, which is where
Energy Star 4.0 works
today," she says. By 2010, the organisation hopes to get up to 90%,
and save roughly half the emissions from desktop computers.
Power supplies on servers are generally better configured, at
85% efficiency. Traditionally, data centre managers have cared more
than desktop procurement managers about such things because of the
power constraints in the data centre. Server virtualisation has
been the latest trend to increase power efficiency, and
VMWare has been the darling of the virtualisation industry.
The virtualisation story may be relatively well known, but now
companies are trying to make the process more efficient. For
example, business intelligence vendor
SAS has an agreement
with VMWare to produce technology that better enables IT customers
to begin charging computing cycles back to internal business
departments.
However, there are still unresolved issues around
virtualisation, says Alyssa Farrell, marketing manager for
sustainability solutions at SAS. "I hear from CIOs in the US and
Europe that there's a hesitancy to push mission-critical production
systems into a virtualised environment," she says, calling for SLAs
to help soothe troubled business managers.
There are other ways to increase virtualisation efficiency, says
Martin Niemer, senior product marketing manager at VMWare. The
company recently extended its Distributed Resource Scheduler system
to include distributed power management. This enables
administrators to move virtual machines between different boxes so
that they can shut down physical units during periods of low
demand, such as at night.
"In the morning, if use is increasing, we can move the virtual
machines from one server to the other, and give them the power
again if they need it," he says.
Effective measures
The effectiveness of such measures can vary according to the way
an IT infrastructure is deployed. Mick Walker, a green computing
consultant in IBM's systems and technology group, advocates
centralisation of computing resources as a way to cut power
consumption.
"For organisations with a lot of deskbound function, then
virtual centralised servers are the better option," he says. "You
could have an environment with three to four data centres,
interconnected in a way that the process is moved around, depending
on the workload, the cooling, and the energy available in a given
location."
Without that centralised computing resource, there will be a lot
of high-powered desktops on the LAN, many of which will be left on
by their users. Here, as in the server room, power monitoring and
control is becoming a big issue. Companies such as
1E and Seattle-based
Verdiem sell power management
tools that run on desktops, turning them on and off at scheduled
times and providing reports on power usage. Intel's vPro
technology, embedded directly into its processors, also allows
machines to be turned on across different subnets, making it
possible for machines to be switched off for most of the time at
night and powered up for routine tasks such as patch
management.
Server-side vendors also use energy monitoring systems for their
own equipment. IBM's Active Energy Manager reports real-time energy
consumption across all of its server platforms, explains Walker,
adding that it can be used to cap power consumption on a per-server
basis. "If you're limited on electricity, you could decide that all
of your online transaction processing systems have as much energy
as they want, but then at 5pm in the evening you cap the energy
they're allowed to use," he says.
Such technologies are useful in theory, says St Marthe. In
practice, though, cultural considerations often get in the way.
"Unix guys aren't turning the agents on," he says. "They're
thinking 'Unix guys know best', and it's difficult to make a
culture change. It's just not comfortable for them. 'I always wrote
a script', they say. 'Why don't I carry on doing that?'"
Power management issues
While IT managers grapple with such power management issues at
the desktop PC level and in the server room, they shouldn't ignore
the third area of concern: the network. As the network comes under
more pressure from tasks such as deep packet inspection,
high-bandwidth switching and VoIP, savvy companies will explore
power efficiency options.
These options can often come from unexpected quarters. VoIP
phones powered using Power over Ethernet can be made to switch off
at night, says Paul Phillips, regional director at Extreme
Networks.
"We're also seeing the development of standards for network
power management," he says, citing the development of energy
efficient ethernet. This technology, dubbed 802.3 by the IEEE,
throttles back high-speed ethernet connections when only low-speed
connectivity is needed, thus saving power in the devices
transmitting and receiving the data.
While it is often possible to retrofit networks with new
equipment to maximise efficiency, things can be more difficult in
the datacentre. Datacentre power consumption is increasing rapidly
as computing requirements increase. A report to congress by the EPA
last June revealed that server energy use in the data centre had
doubled in the past five years. The organisation is also studying
an energy star rating for data centres.
The Green Grid, a consortium of vendors in the US, has been
putting together best practice power management issues for
datacentre managers, and earlier this year announced a new set of
data centre efficiency guidelines developed with the Distributed
Management Task Force.
Some datacentre specialists are looking into innovations such as
combined heat and power (CHP), in which heat from the facility is
reused in other parts of the building, and perhaps even used to
make cheap electricity.
"We're investigating alternative generation technology. In
California we're looking at a fuel cell test for generating
electricity, and also at building co-generation that let us produce
power on site from less invasive utilities such as natural gas,"
says Pat Leonard, senior manager of strategic initiatives at
datacentre operator Equinix.
"We're looking at solar panels too, although they can only do so
much, and there's a large concentration of power in the data
centre.
Cooling, which takes up a significant percentage of a
datacentre's power requirements, is traditionally handled with
expensive cooling towers. Equinix is also looking into heat
exchangers that use either 'grey water' (water that has already
been used in other parts of a building) or ambient air to extract
heat from air inside the server room.
Hard to retrofit
Again, these can be hard to retrofit, but IBM's Walker suggests
other options for direct equipment cooling. "We will have a range
of products where the liquid is directly taken to the chip. It's
not water - it's some other non-corrosive fluid," he says. Such
systems could be plugged into a blade server rack.
"We also have a heat exchanger which is like a big radiator that
sits on the back of a 19-inch rack and reduces the temperature," he
says, explaining that the water-cooled system can be retrofitted to
existing racks. "We can do thermal imaging, identify areas that are
too hot, and consequently reduce the ambient temperature."
Power consumption is at the forefront of most IT directors'
minds, because 'power' and 'budget' are interchangeable, but
Melissa Quinn, sustainability programmes manager at Canadian IT
reseller Softchoice, urges
companies to think about green IT in a wider context.
"It starts with what the manufacturer is doing, and it's also
about packaging," she says. "It's about the whole lifecycle of the
technology." She includes carbon consumption and materials used
upstream during manufacturing in her considerations. "And then,
when you're getting rid of it, where is it going?" she adds.
Softchoice recently developed a database that married the Green
Technology Council's EPEAT standard with CNET's product database.
EPEAT's product evaluation accounts for the supply chain inputs and
outputs so that buyers can use it to help with a wider assessment
of a product's environmental impact.
Casting an eye up and down the supply chain when procuring
equipment is not enough when trying to minimise the environmental
impact of IT. IT directors should also consider looking outside
their own department within the rest of the company, says St
Marthe, particularly when it comes to power consumption.
"How can IT departments share that responsibility with others?"
he asks, pointing out that the people who pay the electricity bills
aren't generally the same people that keep the servers running. "Is
the facilities function talking to the IT department, or are they
seen still as separate instances?"
That kind of integration can be taken further. While many
struggle with making IT green, others are looking forward to using
IT as a tool to reduce carbon emissions throughout the rest of the
organisation. As the role of IT moves from cost centre to profit
centre, it has the chance to serve as the boiler room for the rest
of the organisation - and that creates opportunities to drive power
efficiencies into everything from building control to fleet
management. With enough forethought, an IT department can colour
the rest of the business green too.