by Angela Miller
This week the ecology.IT blog officially moved to a web hosting service that is 100% solar-powered. GreenestHost.com was featured in Ted Samson’s blog 2 weeks ago and officially came online on August 6, 2007.

A couple of things impressed me about this company:

• They worked closely with vendors including AMD, VMWare, and Freus, to ensure they both chose the right technology and configured it appropriately for optimal energy efficiency and cooling.
• They worked with a mature company (AISO) to develop a web-hosting service built on a solid foundation.
• They deployed a solar environment that is self-sufficient and integrated with a battery system for use at night.

While this is not an endorsement or recommendation that everyone should switch to Greenesthost.com as a service provider, it does highlight that there is business sense in establishing and offering green computing technologies.

by Angela Miller
I had a very interesting conversation with David Merrill today about one of the significant challenges that CIOs face: the economics of energy efficiency in the data center. Mr. Merrill (in my humble opinion) is a thought leader in Storage Economics, and for the last 18 months he’s been blogging about this discipline for Hitachi Data Systems*. He had some interesting tidbits regarding energy usage in data centers, the most compelling of which for me was that the typical enterprise data center now consumes 50% of the company’s electric bill and nearly 50% of that is due to storage. He backed these numbers up with studies from Gartner (March 2007) and ESG (July 2007).

Pondering these statistics lead to a conversation about the economics of energy efficiency and the business case for green computing. From Mr. Merrill’s perspective, the business case for the typical CIO would be built on cost savings from energy efficiency, cooling optimization, and from the floor space savings that could be realized from implementing a sustainable infrastructure strategy.

“CIOs typically choose energy efficiency not for moral consciousness or being chic or trendy, but because it makes economic sense”. — David Merrill

My thoughts went to challenging information technology departments to take green computing further than the straight energy costs and how instead to sell the business case for environmental benefits. His response was realistic: environmental benefits tend to be in addition to the bottom line economics, either through compliance with laws, or certification, or deferring spending on future solutions. In other words, for a CIO, environmental choices would rarely justify a business case on their own.

We talked about hybrid vehicle sales in the United States as a case study: while some individuals invested in hybrid vehicles purely as an environmental statement; the sales of hybrids, especially in states like California, really escalated when the gas prices rose substantially and drove consumers to make practical, economic choices.

In some parts of the world, especially in Europe or in densely-populated small regions like New England, Singapore, and Hong Kong for example, CIOs will start to face the reality that energy prices will drive up their IT budgets substantially. The local energy utility may either charge escalating utility rates or be unable to deliver energy to meet the company’s growing demands.

For these CIOs, the challenges of space, power, and cooling constraints drive them to consider green computing strategies to squeeze the maximum benefit from their infrastructure. So like the substantial growth in purchases of hybrid vehicles accompanied substantial increases in gasoline prices, so too will green computing initiatives likely increase as IT teams strategize to overcome their energy, space, and cooling challenges and their unsustainable consumption model.

Dig deeper on the issues:

Storage.ITworld.com article on David Merrill
*I am a former employee of HDS. This post is in no way affiliated with HDS.

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
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.