Green IT - A Common Sense Approach to Green Computing

by Rowan O’Donoghue (Director of Innovation & Development)

There’s not a day goes by where we don’t see an advert with some sort of a “Green” message in it, but is this not just a case of the major vendors hopping on the “Green” bandwagon with some creative marketing ploy to make us all feel somewhat guilty in the hope of forcing us buy the latest technology? Some of it could even be classed as scare‐mongering! Even I myself am probably viewed by my family as some sort of deranged lunatic chasing about the house seeking out phone chargers and TV’s on standby and bursting into spontaneous lectures on the importance of saving electricity!

Not so long ago, being “Green” meant being socially responsible by disposing of products in a environmentally friendly manner, so what’s this new Green Computing concept that we are hearing so much of lately? Put simply, it’s just a term used to denote efficient utilisation of resources in computing. Green computing may be a new concept for many in today’s climate, but one of the first industry bodies to be set up to address these issues was the Energy Star program back in 1992 created by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star served as a voluntary eco‐labelling award given to manufacturers who succeeded in minimising energy consumption but maximising efficiency.

While we would all love to say that we are engaged in the “Green” reform as part of a save‐the‐planet‐for‐the‐kids movement – the reality is, it’s not a top priority. According to a recent Green IT survey conducted by IDC, the primary driver was due to economics and the company’s desire to reduce operational costs. According to this same survey, over 50% of customers are now actively considering vendor’s “greenness” when it comes to them selecting a supplier. Even from recent meetings with customers myself, one thing is becoming more and more clear. CIO’s are now realising that environmental concern and business success can go hand in hand – and that a green data centre is one of the best ways to accommodate growth and make a positive impact on their company’s bottom line.

In reality, power costs have doubled over the last four years, and are due to triple over the next five. The cost of oil now exceeds $140 a barrel and is as volatile as ever, so in line with this, the cost of providing services is also bound to increase. The shift of the cost of energy from facilities to the IT department is hampering the goals of many businesses to drive new projects etc due to the rising costs in running the infrastructure itself, but in reality it is these two departments must collaborate and develop synergy in finding ways to meet the environmental and energy challenges posed. Energy consumption today accounts for over 45% of a data centres cost of ownership, and cooling in most cases is the top consumer of this energy accounting for up to 35%. The problem is, while computer technology has become more efficient over the years, it’s typically the same legacy air conditioning and UPS systems servicing the environment. Some of the latest UPS systems can now reduce energy loss by as much as 72% compared to older models, while current air conditioning systems can improve efficiency by up to 50%.

If we take a look at new technologies that can supplement air‐conditioning systems, a good example of using old technology to address some of today’s data centres problems are some of the latest water cooling solutions from the likes of IBM and HP. Products such as IBM’s heat door exchanger can reduce the heat output from a server rack by up to 50%. A typical rack full of servers consumed about 5kW 5 years ago, compared to a whopping 30kW today. Water can also absorb more heat than air, and the pumps required to circulate the water in a cooling system consume less power than air‐conditioning systems. Water is already in data centres and is probably just right above the server racks – it’s just a case of tapping into this at the rack level. On the downside, convincing people to pipe water through racks full of expensive servers hosting valuable data is not going to be easy task, but those more open to the concept will be those IT managers from a Mainframe vintage.

The thought of adopting and formulating a green data centre can be a monumental and complex undertaking, but there are many solutions and techniques available to support the transition. While there is no right or wrong way, the first step should be to perform an assessment to obtain a baseline for further planning. Local assistance from organisations such as Sustainable Energy Ireland can help with this if required. From this a framework can be developed identifying areas where energy efficiency can be maximised. Even without engaging with an outside body, some practical steps can be taken which will result in immediate savings can be made with little or no investment. Such steps include:

• Proper use of blanking panels in computer racks, rather than trying to cram as many servers into one rack as possible. This will avoid creating hot‐spots within the environment and reduce the likelihood of heat related failures with equipment.
• Clear out any under floor blockages in the data centre that will impede air flow. I’ve seen the good and the bad, from those that have glass panel tiles to show off their lovely neat cabling, to those that look like spaghetti junctions. Air not being allowed to flow properly under the tiles will create hot‐spots and put the existing air conditioning units under increased pressure.
• Replace standard lighting with energy efficient bulbs. Most of our customers have now gone one step further and have put in movement sensors that only turn on the lights when someone walks into the data centre.
• Arrange server racks in hot and cold aisle configurations. Ensure that ventilation tiles are used in the correct locations where they will be most efficient.
• Turn off any servers that are not used within the environment.

While the above focus is primarily on data centres, think about where similar practical steps can be taken in office environments. How many times have we all printed documents on one side only? Even today we are still doing it!! By printing on both sides of a page you reduce your paper consumption by 50%! Some banks today in Europe print over 300,000 pages per day, so you can imagine the amount of savings per year that could be achieved.

Consolidation and taking advantage of the latest in Virtualisation technology is also one of the major ways in which to maximise computing efficiency while reducing the energy consumption within your company. After all, if you have a server which is performing at 14% utilisation, why pay the same amount on energy consumption as the server running at 95% utilisation? Server virtualisation products such as ESX Server from VMware and the POWER6 / PowerVM offerings from IBM are some of the more popular solutions, but don’t overlook options to take advantage of virtualisation in your SAN storage or even throughout your desktop base. Since the advent of SAN’s, few companies have continued age old traditions of sporadic data pruning when file systems got to 99% utilisation. Now, on average, 65% of data sitting on SAN storage is historical data which has not been accessed for over 3 months – yet we are still happy to fork cash for additional storage units when space becomes an issue. Solutions in the ILM and Data Archiving areas can help with removing this data from expensive fibre disk, not to mention technologies such as data‐deduplication. Remember one thing though – if you are hosting this on your SAN, it will impact on your application response times and if you are unfortunate enough to have to perform a DR, will be sitting around while that same 70% of inactive data is being recovered!

If you need to keep historical data online for extended periods of time, you could look at vendors such as Copan Systems and what they are doing with their disk technology. Within a Copan Systems disk array, only those disks which are serving requests for read/write activity are powered on, the others are all in standby. Overall, only 10% of the disks in the storage unit are active at any one time resulting in huge power savings. If you are looking to perform a technology refresh on your desktop PC base, look at VMware’s Virtual Desktop Initiative. Replacing a typical desktop PC with a thin client device that consumes just 3% of the power of a traditional desktop PC will not only result in less power consumption, but less stress on the environmental systems to cool the office. For example, say you had 150 desktop PC’s in your office. If it cost €150 per year in electricity to run these based on average workloads that could mean savings of up to €23,000 per year in direct energy cost by adopting such a solution. Not to mention the savings of that a standard consolidated desktop image will bring to the environment.

A company getting buy‐in from the staff can also stand to make substantial savings outside of IT. I recently gave a presentation on energy efficiency and how virtualisation can play a key part at one of our own events recently, and covered some interesting local case studies. Two in particular where Wyeth and Tesco. As part of SEI’s Power‐of‐One campaign, Wyeth in Newbridge managed to achieve savings of over €150,000 per year just by employees ensuring that non‐essential equipment was powered off at the end of each business day – a good example of where results can be achieved without any investment at all. Tesco Ireland on the other hand was able to achieve savings of €1.7million in 2006 by investing €1million – but even more impressive is the fact that they will continue to save the €1.7million on a year‐by‐year basis going forward.

Something commonly overlooked as part of a Green project, is E‐Waste. While the benefits of adopting a Green approach are clear, what happens with all that equipment that is being decommissioned and thrown out? A damning report back in the latter half of 2005 uncovered that electrical waste such as computers used in the United States was being shipped to China and India where they were polluting the environment and exposing workers to toxic chemicals where the equipment was being dismantled. Thankfully the EU and the US stepped up to the plate in the form of producer take‐back bills to ratify schemes which ensured that manufacturers were obliged to take back electronicl equipment and to dispose of in an environmentally friendly way.

Even relatively small companies can reduce their carbon footprint while at the same time taking advantage of business benefits – take our own Rapid‐Support offering for example. Rapid‐Support is an innovative solution which was developed to tackle a number of issues. Efficient resource utilisation, better effectiveness and utilisation of support resources, and a drive to offer customers new ways of supporting their environments very cost effectively. It now means that we no longer need to send our technical consultants to the four corners of the globe to perform services work, instead can all be done remotely and securely, while at the same time meeting PCI and SOX compliance regulations while at the same time giving the customer more cost effective support. So, in conclusion, there are some important messages to be aware of today. It’s now clear that going green is a necessity that every company is going to have to embrace – not as an aspiration to save the planet, but in order to remain competitive and to survive economically. Yes, you will need to outlay some cash to achieve Green Status, but as mentioned there are also some practical steps that can be taken within existing environments to achieve substantial savings.