by Angela Miller
Google brought more excitement to green computing this week with their announcement that they are promoting a new Climate Saver’s Initiative. This coupled with their ongoing commitment to environmental stewardship puts a stake in the ground on what corporations can do to green their information technology and their entire company operations.

Needless to say the Internet is atwitter today over this announcement. It is easy to be impressed. First of all they were able to negotiate a consortium of big name players to commit to the mission of Climate Savers: IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, EDS, even the EPA and the World Wildlife Fund. They have the right balance of big-name technology vendors, government, and nonprofit to kick it off. Google already demonstrated a commitment to reach further than corporate acquisition of carbon offsets, for instance, with their construction of solar energy capacity, fleet of clean vehicles, and locally-sourced food in their corporate cafeteria. The fact that Mr. Weihl’s title on his blog is “green energy czar” is testimony to the seriousness with which they are approaching their greening initiatives. They have the legitimacy and power of a positive corporate brand behind it. And they have people talking – which can only be good.

Not every company will put this kind of emphasis on their environmental responsibility. But Google is an excellent example of what can be accomplished at the corporate level. They clearly have a thought-leadership position for greening of corporate operations.

For companies that want to take smaller steps, Mr. Weihl makes some great points in his post about the efficiency and optimization of current resources – for example power saving features on existing personal computers. How small steps toward optimizing current technology resources could have significant energy savings for the typical company.

Having big-named players demonstrate their commitment to the environment in such progressive and economically-justifiable ways gives me hope that other companies will see the value in taking even small steps toward greening their technology.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Bill Weihl’s Official Google Blog Post
ITWire
PodTech audio announcement of Climate Savers
NetworkWorld
Wall Street Journal

by Angela Miller
I thought it worth it to repost a message (with permission) from a colleague at my former company.  David Merrill from Hitachi Data Systems blogs about “Storage Economics” - a topic that is extremely important to green computing. Here’s the text of the post for your reference:

Virtualization Economics

April 14th, 2007
I attended a CSC Consulting conference this past week, and listened in on a forum on Virtualization, and the operational benefits of this approach with servers and storage. I was intrigued to hear the comparisons and differences between server virtualization (and hypervisor) and storage virtualization. Some of the talk went into how virtualization helps reduce TCO for the enterprise. I believed this statement to be true, but some of the side discussions spend a lot of time justifying these economic statements.

After the workshop, in a conversation with a CSC colleague on this topic, some key points were discussed, because people often ask me about storage virtualization economics, if and how does this technology (like the USP or NSC) really save money. Here is what I told my colleague yesterday:

• Although an important technology, virtualization is not a direct cost impact functionality. Rather, virtualization is an enabler of other cost reduction functions
• Virtualization requires some advanced operational and architecture capability to realize the full benefits
• Virtualization is not free
• There is a cross-over point (as with most technologies) where the cost to virtualize provides long-term payback from the initial investment. With very small storage environments, the cross over point may never be realized.
• The direct cost-lowing-functions that virtualization enables are (partial listing):
  • Integrated tiered storage, with the cost benefit of the right data on the right value of storage infrastructure
  • ILM and DLM with rapid data movement and remastering
  • Single management point, with multiple storage types, technologies
  • Better asset utilization, reducing long-term CAPEX
  • Reduction of software licenses
  • Reduction of HW and SW maintenance
  • Although a better-trained SA is needed, the TB-per-FTE can be much higher
  • With better aggregate utilization, the environmental costs per unit of storage is reduced

You can see from the list above that virtualization impacts several types of storage ownership cost, many of which can be reduced when virtualization is applied at the right place with the right investment and architecture.

by Angela Miller
Carbon offsets are another solid option for companies that wish to green their IT department. It is possible to estimate the carbon load or footprint generated by the IT department on an annual basis and then invest in carbon offsets through a company or non-profit that sells certified emission reduction certificates. Again these certificates fund investment in net new renewable energy sources that would generate the same amount of electricity required to power the IT department on an annual basis only with zero carbon emissions.

Carbon trading became extremely active over the last two years and carbon offsets are easily available through a variety of reputable sources. An article on AdvancedTrading.com focused on the increased and robust trading in ‘carbon futures’ and how the trend is dramatically increasing.

It is important for companies to realize that purchasing carbon offsets does not provide a tangible and sustainable benefit to their company beyond the ability to market to their employees and customers that they are now ‘carbon neutral.’ But in a climate where customers are growing more concerned about how green their service providers and suppliers are, being carbon neutral could be a differentiator.

I am assuming that simply posting that companies should consider carbon offsets as a valuable tool in their green computing strategy will engender comments both from people who feel that they are nothing more than ‘buying your conscience so you can pollute more instead of addressing the problem’ and those who believe they are a smokescreen and a waste of money that could be invested in other IT improvements instead. I disagree with both of these stances and instead believe that any steps toward investing in new, cleaner technologies will have tangible long-term benefit for all. It is important that companies purchase carbon offsets from entities that are both reputable and that commit to real investment instead of simple futures trading. A few examples include (not a personal endorsement, but a list of entities I’ve researched):

TerraPass
The Gold Standard
ClimateTrust

For a report about the efficacy of carbon offset entities, check out the report information at Clean Air-Cool Planet.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:
www.tekrati.com
Advanced Trading
Clean Air-Cool Planet
United States Environmental Protection Agency

by Angela Miller
While most IT departments would invest only in the basics of green computing based efficiency or cost savings, more advance companies will want to take their environmental initiatives further. These companies would potentially add environmental criteria to their IT projects- especially those that include purchasing new hardware where measurable, objective metrics on performance and manufacturing practice could be evaluated.

IT marketing research firm Forrester featured three analyses of green computing between April and May 2007: “Why Green IT Should Feature in Sourcing Plans” (Davis), “The Greening of IT” (Mines), and “Tapping Buyers Growing Interest in Green IT” (Mines). Each of these analyses highlighted the growing interest in green IT, and their conclusions were unsurprising—many forward-thinking, large companies placed environmental issues high on their list of corporate social responsibility initiatives; but most companies focused on Green IT as a matter of economics rather than ecology:

“We would do green because it makes business sense, not because it’s green. It would have to show cost savings.” – CIO quote to Forrester in “Tapping Buyers Growing Interest in Green IT” (Mines, May 2007, Copyright © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc.)

My previous post focus on the steps that the companies highlighted by Forrester could follow in order to meet their basic green IT needs driven by cost savings. This post takes another step down the green computing road by discussing a more advanced concept- Alternative Energy Sourcing.

Alternative Energy Sourcing

Many utilities now offer business customers the option of purchasing power which includes either a partial or 100% mix of renewable energy sources. For example, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power now offers customers the ability to choose Green Power for a premium of $0.03 per kilowatt hour of power. The State of California specifically has incentives to encourage utilities to invest in net new renewable energy sources and the companies use the premiums to assist in investing in the new construction.

Investment in alternative energy sourcing does not have a positive financial impact for an IT department. In fact, many companies might find it a tough sell at an enterprise level to pay the significantly higher costs of a 100% alternative energy mix. For small-to-medium businesses, however, such an investment could be small and worth the minor cost increase while for larger organizations a mix of less than 100% could still provide the opportunity to take steps toward greener IT.

Companies interested in investigating alternative energy sourcing should start by reviewing the US EPA guidelines here.

by Angela Miller
With the rise of the environmental movement over the last decade, it should come as no surprise that the concept of ‘green computing’ is gathering steam. Now that vendors recognize that from a branding perspective there exists opportunity in being environmentally friendly, many companies are diving into green computing with gusto. But as vendors begin to tout their capabilities, CIOs and IT Managers may find their companies unwilling to invest in these new capabilities simply to meet the objective of being greener.

For most enterprise and small-to-medium businesses, decisions will instead be made on whether the investment presents good return-on-investment (ROI).

To build the right business case, IT decision makers must understand the basics about green computing and how this investment could both improve their corporate social responsibility and their financial bottom line. Armed with the information, implementing changes that positively impact the environment becomes the right ecological and economic decision.

This post focuses on the basic elements that most IT decision makers will find immediately palatable: energy efficiency, reduction in cooling requirements, and consolidation. Future posts will investigate more advanced green computing concepts like alternative energy sourcing, renewable energy credits, carbon offsets, and certification.

Energy Efficiency

According to Dec-2006 IDC study,

“50 cents is spent on energy for every dollar of computer hardware. This is expected to increase by 54 percent to 71 cents over the next four years.”

While many companies do not consider the facility costs as part of the ROI and total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT projects, increasing energy bills may force this issue.

Consider the analysis compiled by Dr. Janathan Koomey at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory on just the estimated server energy consumption for the United States:

“Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of the total U.S. energy consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are considered, that number grows to 1.2%.”

This analysis was quick to point out that it included only the servers and their required infrastructure, not storage and other IT infrastructure components. Clearly it underestimates the overall resource demand for enterprise data centers. Of greatest concern, however, was his point that electricity demand for servers doubled between 2000 and 2005. Obviously this is not a desirable or sustainable trend.

Tremendous savings could be realized by enterprise data centers if they could deploy more energy-efficient infrastructure. The economics for energy efficiency seem obvious.

Reduction in Cooling Demands

One reality of information technology is that it generates tremendous heat that requires cooling in order to ensure stability in the data center. Even the users’ desktops, laptops, and printers, generate significant heat in the typical office building that requires additional cooling. The cost of cooling are some of the most expensive, energy-intensive demands placed on facilities and significantly reducing the heat load will again result in substantial energy savings.

Consolidation

In my experience, taking a walk through a typical corporate data center never looks like the clean and homogenous picture we see in advertising. Instead, data centers I’ve seen contain a mix of server and storage types, most of which are under-utilized in the name of user performance expectations, poor retirement planning, and changing architectural directions. Almost every CIO for which I have worked has attempted the great consolidation project in the hopes of reducing the complexity and maintenance cost of the infrastructure.

Consolidation also makes good environmental sense if the equipment is chosen wisely, is more efficient than the sum of its replaced parts, is operated in a way that optimizes the energy consumption and performance, and is accompanied by a solid retirement plan for the outdated equipment.

Interestingly many consolidation projects seem to result in new equipment being introduced without the departure of the myriad of servers they were intended to replace.

Also of significant concern – the appropriate recycling and disposal of the retired equipment.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory
Wikipedia “Green Computing” definition
IDC
Gartner
David Merrill, Hitachi Data Systems blog
“Green Computing Picks up Momentum” - ComputerWorld

by Angela Miller
As an both an Information Technology professional and an environmental scientist, I have often found one side of myself having to compromise in order to satisfy the other. For years I’ve needed to ignore the growing energy demands of my different employers’ ever-expanding server rooms in order to bow to the needs of users to have applications and systems constantly in a state of readiness.

It occurred to me as I was working with my previous company Hitachi Data Systems on their RoHS/WEEE compliance initiatives that now may just be the time when IT departments can change the tide. Almost every major server and storage vendor has made a commitment this year to producing equipment that affords the opportunity to gain control of energy consumption in the data center. And most vendors are well on their way to producing equipment more friendly to the environment by at least complying with the interational RoHS/WEEE directives.

But is this enough?

With so much attention on personal environmental accountability today, I thought it would be interesting to focus on corporate environmental responsibility - especially on the concept of ‘green computing.’

Many of the big vendors began publicizing their theories on how their products can help companies green their IT departments. It is interesting that most of the discussion centers around energy efficiency - a concept that was born over 15 years ago through the EnergyStar program. While this program was successful with an individual appliance, it emphasized consumer electronics for the home more than corporate infrastructure. Seems this is about to change as vendors now tout their new alliances with the EnergyStar program and new initiatives to capture the attention of prospective customers through their environmental friendliness, and as the program considers requirements for their standards version 4.0.

But, again, is this enough? Energy efficiency is a great starting point, and RoHS/WEEE manufacturing compliance is a necessary goal … but for the average IT Manager, will simply procuring these items be enough to green their IT? And are IT departments truly concerned about becoming greener? The environmental scientist in me says no — there is more that can and should be done.

This blog will be to investigate the greening of Information Technology - and whether that is an attainable goal without substantial culture shift in corporations.