Going Green Will Cut Costs (20-Sep-07)
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Full story: Going Green Will Cut Costs (20-Sep-07)
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For businesses, green IT is about more just than the worthwhile goal of making a contribution to reducing the threat of global warming and environmental damage. The real impact is financial.
According to the Carbon Trust, a PC left on all day will cost a company about £37 a year. But if switched off at night and at weekends, this drops to nearer £10 a year and saves an equivalent amount of energy to making 34,900 cups of coffee. That is just one PC.
Office equipment is the fastest-growing area of energy use, currently accounting for up to 20 per cent of total output. According to analyst Gartner, IT accounts for two per cent of global carbon emissions.
And that does not even take into account the increasing cost of air conditioning as more powerful processors are squeezed into ever-smaller spaces.
Green IT is simply best practice IT management.
In a series of exclusive web seminars, Computing invited experts to discuss the key aspects of making the move to environmentally-friendly IT, and they answered your questions on green computing. Our experts were:
- Francis Rottenburg, account manager, Carbon Trust.
- Lewis Gee, regional director, VMware.
- Ian Exton, network manager. WWF UK.
- John Hegarty, service quality director, Betfair.
- Patrick Fogarty, director, Norman Disney and Young.
If you are a business and are looking to justify why you should tackle green issues, what is the financial case for doing so?
FR: The business case is very clear. The more energy you save, the more money you are going to put on your bottom line.
Do a simple calculation. Work out if you save 10 per cent of your energy, which is easily achievable, how much product you would have to sell to make that level of profit.
Most of the recommendations the Carbon Trust makes are based on a payback of one year, occasionally two years, and if it’s a high-capital expenditure, then three years. But essentially it’s an easy way of making money. Why not do it?
You are also going to get pressure from your customers. If you are a bank, a supermarket or an iron and steel manufacturer, you are going to come under pressure because everybody is going to have to work out their carbon footprint.
This is something that is going to happen, whether you believe in climate change or not.
Are there any tools to manage and monitor power consumption in the data centre environment?
LG: Energy companies are keen for us to be able to manage and monitor power use. Identifying the power that organisations are using enables them to make savings that way. There are lots of tools for assessing and looking at how efficient your data centre is, and to manage and monitor that.
Unfortunately, in most instances what it will show is that the data centre isn’t working that efficiently, and that you have a lot of wasted resource that you have purchased and should be benefiting from.
There are management tools and measuring tools from all angles, available from the energy companies down to suppliers such as VMware, but it’s about finding that balance.
If the EU takes the lead in saving energy and reducing emissions, will this just cause businesses to relocate operations to countries that are less enthusiastic in pursuing these policies?
FR: In the UK, and the EU as well, we are trying to act as thought leaders in the world.
In many ways we are responsible for the climate change situation, therefore it is beholden on us to do something about that. From an economic perspective, and you can see this in the cheap manufacturing we have had over the past 10 years, you could imagine people leaving very quickly.
But if you look at the Indian perspective, the Chinese perspective, the Brazilian perspective on this, there is a great desire to follow our lead. It is a risk, but I think the world is hopefully a sensible enough place that the risk will be mitigated.
We and Europe have to do it. We are major emitters, and to get to 60 per cent emission reduction by 2050, which is the government and EU target, we just have to do it, come what may.
The problem is that waiting for best practices to settle could take years. What was the turning point that made you, as an organisation, realise this is something you had to do something about?
IE: At WWF we’ve been preaching to businesses for a while, and we’ve been trying to work with businesses to lower their footprint, so really it’s a no-brainer for us. Just standing in our computer room behind those racks of equipment, there’s a blast of hot air that comes out of those very densely-packed servers.
And that’s cost that’s pure money going out of the back of those servers. It shouldn’t be too hard to persuade your board that has to be wrong.
We can pretty much get servers to pay for themselves if we use them more effectively. Without virtualisation, the server is sitting around most of the time doing between four and seven per cent use. The rest of the time it’s doing nothing. You have to think around the problem and try to come up with a variety of ways in which you can persuade your board to cough up the money to replace that infrastructure.
We are looking at blade servers and trying to work out how we can fit that into our strategy so that we can get the footprint down, and there are ways and means of doing that.
JH: We can make a compelling case based on the savings.
We have a fairly active technology refresh programme, so we have a reasonable churn rate and we want to be the best and the most efficient that we can. We can see self-generating business savings by being more efficient, using less power, using less floor space, using less cooling. We also have all the softer issues that are hard to quantify, but it helps to retain our staff because they feel good about working in a firm that focuses on the issues they feel strongly about.
To what extent do IT manufacturers’ green credentials matter when you are selecting suppliers? What sort of approach should you take when selecting suppliers?
PF: Make sure you read behind the headlines. It is in everyone’s interest to tell a good story, and probably some, certainly the biggest organisations in the world, are very good at telling that story.
My challenge would be to make sure that you dig a little bit deeper and understand what they have actually done. Make sure you have the filter on and you can see behind the glossy magazine ad.
What metrics, standards or methodologies can be used to measure energy savings?
IE: It’s quite difficult to put a tangible figure on what power your server is using. You can walk around the server and look at the sticker on the back and it says 600 watts. That’s what it uses when it’s absolutely flat out thrashing, and the only time it ever does that is when you switch it on before all the management software kicks in.
When it’s running at five, six, seven per cent use, it’s difficult to get a figure. Some vendors have sizing utilities for servers and can tell you typically what a server is going to be running at. I found something on HP’s web site that helps give a power figure, and British Thermal Unit figures which you use for air conditioning.
I compared it with the old servers that we used to run they were very big, old, clunky things that we replaced and arrived at some figures. It is tricky but it can be done.
How far does a green IT strategy extend out of the data centre or the desktop? Do you consider mobility, such as encouraging home working and video conferencing to encourage less travel, as representing green IT?
PF: We are a global organisation of 500-plus people, and one of the things we’ve done is drop a lot of flights and use teleconferencing instead. As the technology improves that’s been easier to do. We don’t lose much of the interaction by doing it that way and we tend to shift fewer people around the globe than we used to.
JH: We operate a working from home approach. Typically, staff will work at home one day a week. We also support a programme of encouraging staff to cycle to work. Those are some of the other things that we do to help push this agenda.
IE: Encouraging people to travel less by using desktop conferencing has been quite successful with us. It continues to be something that we’re pushing the staff to use, and we’re lucky because a lot of our staff are very aware of the situation and quite often they’re pushing us; they’re saying: can we work from home?
We help them as much as possible to build an office experience when they are at home. It’s quite a tough thing to do, but it has a lot of benefits for us.
How can software applications be managed so they run efficiently and draw less power?
IE: We have quite a traditional desktop environment, and are looking at various ways to get away from that, to stop running applications on the desktop using thin clients, or something like that.
We can then concentrate the processing in a box where we have more control over it.
PF: There is going to be pressure on the industry to get virtualisation server efficiencies up, and the next step will be looking at what we are actually doing with this software and if it is written to be efficient.
You only have to look at desktop applications to realise they are probably not the most efficient pieces of software.
JH: We have been driving strongly on code efficiency.
In our business, speed is a key thing. In the Cheltenham Gold Cup, after the race last year it took an hour-and-a-half for us to put people’s winnings into their accounts. We optimised our code this year, and this time it took just two minutes. That has benefits for hardware power use. One of the other benefits of virtualisation is that we drive our IT investment harder because we can have more people using it. We get greater use and it helps us avoid throwing extra cash at it to give more infrastructure capacity.
We can give more slices of what we have to people and they can use it more efficiently.
- Source: vnunet.com
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