A Look at What “Green” Means For IT
It's easy to say you want to go green and a lot tougher to figure out where to get started. Even worse, there's little consensus in the IT community on what Green IT is in the first place.
"There needs to be more definition behind it," says Derek Kober, vice president and director of the BPM Forum. "It's similar to cloud computing, with different people defining it in all sorts of ways. It can be viewed along the lines of doing more with less or accomplishing the same amount of compute while being more energy-efficient."
The need for a universally understood definition has never been higher, as IT decision makers struggle to integrate greater sustainability into their infrastructure planning and operations. Going green is increasingly being viewed as an outright necessity as business requirements expand; recession-racked companies slash IT budgets; and access to consistent, inexpensive power becomes more elusive. Just because IT isn't getting the money to revamp the data centre doesn't mean it's any less accountable to do more with less.
"The general demand on compute these days is not shrinking," says Jason Coari, senior marketing manager with SGI (www.sgi.com), which has partnered with the BPM Forum on the Think Eco-Logical initiative to help companies simultaneously become more environmentally friendly and streamline the bottom line. "Datasets are growing exponentially as more rich media moves over corporate networks and the Internet. The kind of computing horsepower needed to support that is growing, and companies are finding that it's expensive from both a capital and operations perspective."
The Green Necessity
With this in mind, Green IT isn't just a feel-good initiative. Instead, it's a key enabler of improved IT performance and is often the only way to meet fast-expanding business needs without busting the budget or disrupting operations. Frances Edmonds, HP Canada's director of environmental programs, says we all need to broaden our understanding of Green IT.
"There's a lot of green washing out there," says Edmonds. "Green IT means a lot of different things, and it's not just buying a piece of hardware that has a higher energy efficiency rating. It also encompasses what materials were used to manufacture that product and how it will be recycled at end-of-life."
More Than Power & Cooling
Data centre managers often focus green efforts on power and cooling. John Phelps, research vice president of servers with Gartner, says most organizations need greater visibility into how these resources are being used.
"Many data centres aren't measuring how much energy they're using," says Phelps, citing a recent Gartner survey in which 70% of respondents did not have a separate IT budget line item for energy costs. "IT is often the company's largest user of energy, but where's the incentive to cut back if there's a meter for the whole building but not on the data centre itself?"
Even with measurement in place, Phelps says many organizations remain myopic. Going green involves a much wider focus, including green data centre infrastructure, recycling electronics and paper, alternative and renewable energy sources, green education for employees, carpooling, teleworking, and print reduction programs.
Manage Resources Wisely
Demand management—reducing the IT load by deploying applications and related resources more efficiently—is another promising area. Phelps says consolidation and virtualization, data deduplication, removal of equipment following decommissioning, and rightsizing of servers by avoiding over provisioning can reduce inefficient usage that fails to drive productivity.
Jeffrey Hill, co-author of "Green IT For Dummies," says many data centres are already stuffed with too much equipment, and systems administrators don't know what they do and are afraid to pull the plug. He says they need to do precisely that.
"A large computer manufacturer recently audited their corporate data centre and found out that 35% of the applications running there could be either replaced, retired, or moved out into a workgroup environment, thus saving power, cooling, and valuable floor space," says Hill, who says IT doesn't have to dive head-first into virtualization to derive quick and inexpensive benefits.
"Virtualization is such an industry buzzword and the preferred solution to every ill that people tend to forget consolidation of physical servers, exclusive of virtualization, is a step that will yield similar results," says Hill. "Any reduction in the number of the physical servers will cause a reduction in the amount of power consumed and cooling required."
Tiered storage that shifts lower-demand data away from energy-consuming high-speed and high-availability drives toward lower-availability-and more energy-efficient-storage is another alternative. So is application architecture.
"There's a lot of code out there that's not very efficient, or it goes into a spin loop instead of a wait state and ends up driving some of this extra capacity," says Phelps. Tighter, more efficient code-reminiscent of the mainframe era, when compute cycles were scarce and expensive-would consume fewer IT resources than today's relatively bloated apps.
"Workload is the biggest consideration, and as workload goes down, electrical consumption goes down, as well," says Phelps, adding that newer, intelligent processors, UPSes, and other data centre equipment will allow managers to dynamically power equipment down during low-demand periods. "In the past, all of this equipment would have used the same energy whether running under 80% or 30% load."
Don't Go Overboard
As beneficial as Green IT can be to the bottom line, the BPM Forum's Kober warns against losing sight of underlying business needs. Overzealous greening of a data centre can put operations at risk if it compromises infrastructure performance or availability.
"Your environmental policies have to make sense," he says. "It's about making improvements in an organized and efficient way, and it really can be quite a balancing act."
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