IDC and the Environment

From Lauraibm

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Full article: IDC and the Environment

Papers

Summaries

Full article: Energy Insights: Top 10 Predictions for the Energy Industry in 2007

  1. Focus on climate change will spawn investment in energy and information technologies
  2. Venture capital investment in energy sector will continue to expand
  3. Geological, technical, and economic factors will drive innovation in reserves management
  4. Change to daylight savings time in the U.S. will disrupt business as usual
  5. Aging workforce will continue to be a major challenge for energy industry US
  6. Aging assets and associated reliability concerns will drive intelligent grid technology investments
  7. Sensing technologies will drive a shift to real-time sense-and-respond paradigm
  8. Energy trading focus will shift to intra-day visibility, liquidity, and market behavior
  9. Web self-service and on-line communication for utility customers will increase
  10. Growth in IT spending for oil and gas companies will exceed that for utilities

Sun Servers and PG and E: The Value of Being Green

In 2006 PG&E announced a first of its kind energy rebate program; rebates were offered to customers trading in existing servers for Sun’s T1000 and T2000 CoolThread servers. This program offers PG&E customers an opportunity to reduce server power consumption as well as subsidise acquisition costs by up to 35%. IDC believe that customers will welcome rebates that offset surges in utility costs and expect this program to open doors for Sun sales staff.

It is expect for other vendors to respond shortly, but it is clear that Sun has moved this issue to the front lines.

As a result of the increasing emphasis being placed on energy issues IDC believe that IT users need to evaluate and carefully consider the infrastructure investments they make and confirm that power and cooling considerations are clearly understood and evaluated.

HP Fine Tunes its Strategy Arund Green Computing and Energy Efficiency

HP aims to take a leading position in the marketplace in terms of communicating both environmental considerations and energy efficiency. Their focus on environmental responsibility has resulted in a drive towards more efficient products and IT operations from an energy perspective.

HP have taken steps to position themselves as a leader in the educating world on how to reduce the overall negative environmental impact attributed to IT from manufacture through distribution and operations. The corporation annually publish a Global Citizenship Report which lays out their internal and external targets in terms of CSR for the coming year e.g. to reduce by 20% on 2005 levels the combined energy consumption of HP operations and products by 2010.

HP have implemented a detailed five step methodology to understand and reduce the environmental impact of HP and HP owned products across the entire product lifecycle, this methodology is made up of two components measurement and offsetting.

At the data centre level HP is looking to develop a standardised metric to measure data centre efficiency using the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) calculation. This equation can be extended to consider data centre efficiency (DCE). Combined these equations will enable benchmarking of enterprise data centres, allow informed decision making during the design and build of new data centres and also allow for regulations to be put in place by the EC for data centre efficiency targets.

It is estimated that around 63% of total power into the data centre is consumed by cooling. HPs Dynamic Smart Cooling is a solution that will dynamically provision cooling capacity across the data centre according to real time requirements; this is an effective tool that can be used by any data centre estate to achieve significant energy savings.

IDC predict that in the future there will be an increased emphasis placed on power efficiency in relation to IT, this will be driven by factors such as an increase in importance of product labelling and a considerable increase on the emphasis placed on environmental aspects of IT operations.

Big Blue Focuses Attention on "Big Green"

May 2007 saw IBM announce “Project Big Green”, this is a five part strategy involving diagnosing, building, virtualizing, managing and cooling with the purpose of helping customers to achieve a significantly more energy efficient data centre.

IDC’s research has found that power and cooling concerns are the top issue in data centres today. IBM is quick to recognise that the power and cooling density challenges facing data centre managers today are so extreme that strong partnerships will be needed to adequately address the full range of problems. The fact that IBM has been quick to recognise this is very positive as research by IDC has found that most IT managers have no idea how significant the problem is.

IBM’s “big green” strategy has a patented “stored cooling” solution, this allows the system to be optimised for specific temperature requirements in data centres around the globe. IBM claims that this solution makes existing chilled water cooling infrastructures run 40 – 50% more efficiently.

Sustainability: Using IT to Support and Benefit from Going Green

Expectations for socially conscious corporations has become more sophisticated over the past couple of decades, this growing concern for sustainable practices requires IT and IT vendors to adapt as well, there needs to be innovation in the products and services companies use to support a changing business model.

One of the most significant announcements from an IT perspective is IBM’s “Project Big Green”; this involves IBM applying the concept of sustainability to its entire product and services line as well as internal business practices. As sustainability now has an impact upon a company’s competitive dynamic it is expected that many companies will do the same.

Sustainability is expected to impact IT in a number of ways, these include; product life-cycle management, returns processing, transportation management and hardware management.

For an overview on the topic(s), see also

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