Towards Leaner,Meaner & Greener IT Setup

The ultimate objective for going green is to reduce operational costs and increase the efficiency of your IT infrastructure. We tell you how to do that with inputs from144 CIOs on what they've already done in green IT and what they plan to do in the near future

Saturday, April 05, 2008

The entire world today is abuzz with green. No, it's not green with envy, but green as in becoming more eco-friendly, environment friendly, etc. Just about every vendor worth its name today has already introduced or is in the process of aggressively introducing green IT products, right from hardware components manufacturers to large scale data center solution providers.

The reasons for this are simple. IT is a must for every business, and as the business grows, an organization needs to invest more in the IT infrastructure. With the rising cost of energy, more IT equipment translates to higher costs of power consumption, and also more space, which anyways comes at a premium. So if products continue consuming the power they have been consuming, then it could have serious implications. Last year, Gartner estimated that ICT accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions, which is same as the aviation industry. That's a high figure by any means, and unsustainable as suggested by Gartner.

The other problem with ICT is that products like PCs, laptops, etc have short lifecycles, due to which they become obsolete after a few years. After that, if they're not disposed off properly, then they can be harmful to the environment. So manufacturers have to comply with directives like ROHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) to minimize risks from e-waste, and organizations that use them must dispose them properly after they become obsolete.

Given all this, organizations need environment friendly and energy efficient products to reduce their costs and become more efficient. So obviously as a CIO, you have a tough challenge in your hands. You need to purchase more power and eco-friendly IT equipment, to reduce your energy costs and also show some responsibility for the environment. But this can't be done at the cost of reducing the efficiency of your IT infrastructure because the entire business depends on it. CIOs need products that consume lesser power but don't compromise on efficiency and performance. Besides products, there are many technologies and techniques to make your organizations more energy efficient. Finally, to deploy all these products, technologies and techniques, you need a proper strategy, along with the right policies and practices.

So the obvious questions are--How do you go green? What are some of the challenges you're likely to face on this path? Which products, technologies, and techniques are available for doing it and how do you choose the right ones?

To find answers to these questions and more, we surveyed 144 CIOs from various organizations across the country to find out where they stood as far as going green was concerned.

Awareness about green IT
While nearly 56% of the CIOs whom we surveyed were somewhat familiar with the concept of Green IT, a good one fourth of them were fully familiar. That's a good sign, and shows the growing importance of Green IT. Out of those CIOs who were fully familiar with the concept, nearly half had it as their top priority, and were pursuing it aggressively. The other half had it on the cards, but hadn't done anything concrete about it yet.

In fact, 52% of the overall respondents said that it was there on the cards, while another 22%, irrespective of their familiarity level with the concept, had it as their top priority.

The concerning result was that nearly 22% of the respondents didn't have a green IT strategy at all, and their reason for this was primarily a lack of awareness. They were just not sure what Green IT really meant, so how could they possibly have an action plan for it? So let's first clear the air about the concept of Green IT itself.

Green IT, in brief
In brief, Green IT deals with efficient usage of computing resources in an organization, so that it's not only economically viable, but also environment friendly. The important thing to remember here is that economic viability isn't associated with the initial cost of acquiring a product alone. It's also directly linked with the energy consumed by that product, and how many global standard it adheres to (like Energy Star, ROHS, etc) so that it can be managed efficiently throughout its life and even when the time comes to dispose it off. The first part, higher energy consumption, translates to higher electricity bills-simple. And with increasing energy costs everywhere (and the state of power problems in India in particular), it's important to understand how much energy do your computing resources consume. By doing that, and by choosing products that consume lesser energy, you could end up doing considerable savings in your electricity bills.

The good news is that most vendors today have a focus on making their products more eco-friendly and energy efficient. So, you'll find everything from more energy efficient PC components like motherboards, hard drives, etc to everything in the data center, right from the storage infrastructure to servers, networking, power conditioning, and air conditioning equipment. The concern is how to choose the right equipment and roll out your green IT strategy? There are many challenges involved in this process.

Challenges in going green
Four challenges associated with going green are:
1. Determining the RoI from using Green IT products
2. Adopting and implementing a Green IT Strategy
3. Convincing top management about rolling out the strategy, and finally
4. Choosing the right partner to help you with your strategy
We asked our respondents to rate the difficulty levels of the above challenges. The interesting result was that 50% or more of the respondents found all these challenges to be 'somewhat difficult' to overcome, and nearly another 20% felt that they were rather easy. On a scale of 1 to 5, the 'somewhat difficult' rating would fall at number 3, which is average and the 'easy' rating falls at 2. In other words, most organizations don't find going green such a tough task. Only around 20% of the respondents felt that overcoming these challenges was extremely difficult.
If we drill down specifically into the four challenges, then around 30% of the respondents felt that choosing a green IT partner is extremely difficult. Likewise, convincing top management about going green was considered easy by 26% of the respondents. The next extremely difficult challenge was determining the ROI, for 23% of the respondents.

Other Challenges
There are many other challenges associated with green IT, apart from the four we've just described. One of them is availability, of both equipment and the skills to go green. Though every vendor worth its name today is pushing green IT, how do you decide who has the right products and skills to make your setup green?

The other challenge, which again came out strongly was awareness about the subject. Many CIOs felt that it's important to first create awareness amongst everyone about the need to go green, be it employees of the company or the management. Power saving is everyone's responsibility, and not just the CIO's. Others felt it important to draft out policies, and yet another major segment was more concerned about budgets related to going green.

There were several concerns related to the budget. How do you replace existing equipment, unless it becomes useless was one concern? One can't just go ahead and rip and replace all equipment. That would translate to significant investments. Plus, even if one were to go for replacements, then what do you do with the old yet working equipment? You need to determine ways of recycling them. Then there would be the challenges of setting up new equipment, which would require additional costs related to manpower, consultancy, etc.

The key thing to remember here is that it's not as if you have to rip and replace your entire IT infrastructure with green equipment. That's neither feasible nor practical. Green IT is a transition, which would take both time and investment. It would require careful planning, which would first involve doing a reality check of how green you really are today, and then deciding where you want to reach.

Joining the Green IT bandwagon
Green IT is not a product that you can install and forget about, nor is it an application, which you can implement overnight. Green IT is actually a way to move forward with your entire IT infrastructure. The end objective of green IT is to lower your operational costs and increase the efficiency of your IT infrastructure. Meeting this objective requires a mix of both technology and policies. Interestingly, policies can be both IT and non-IT related.

A green IT policy could be as simple as instructing all employees to switch off both their PCs and monitors before they leave for the day. In fact, in our survey, we asked CIOs about whether their employees switched off both their PCs and monitors before leaving office in the evening. To our surprise, 65% said yes to both, while another 23% said that they switch off the PCs, but often forget to switch off their monitors. There were some who said that the PCs are left in sleep mode so that the IT department can access them during after office hours. We feel that it's a good idea to ensure that both PCs and monitors are switched off, unless there's a very important reason to leave them on (like some maintenance work by the IT department every now and then). CIOs can easily use their network monitoring tools to figure out which PCs have been left on by employees. For the monitors, as of now, there's no way to remotely determine that.

Do a Reality Check of your IT infrastructure
The first step towards going green would be to assess the greenness of your existing IT infrastructure. For this, you need to divide your IT infrastructure into multiple parts, e.g. data center, your desktops and laptops fleet, networking equipment, etc. For each, you could get an audit done to determine the power consumption by each part, and also see how many of them are following green standards like ROHS, etc.

The data center is of course, the most crucial part of the entire IT infrastructure, and therefore requires a lot of planning. You would need to further break it up into multiple parts like power conditioning equipment used, air conditioning, servers, racks and enclosures, and other equipment like storage, etc.

Besides getting your IT infrastructure audited, you also need to keep its future growth in mind. How many PCs and laptops are you likely to purchase in the near future, how much more networking equipment are you likely to add, how much is the server density in your data center going to increase, are some of the things to track.

Understand what's available
Besides the obvious, today just about every hardware manufacturer is coming out with green products. Over the recent past, we have in our lab received many of them. From desktop motherboards to hard drives, network switches to a laser printer's toner cartridge, everything is going green. We reviewed a motherboard from Gigabyte and a hard drive from Western Digital, both of which tout that they consume lesser power. On the networking front, we received a network switch from D-Link that consumes lesser energy. Another company called Extreme Networks, which is into enterprise class network switches has won awards for its green products.

With most vendors offering green IT equipment, it would make sense to change your purchase policy. Sadly though, 44% of our respondents had no pre-defined policy for it. However, there were a good 24% who said that they stressed on the greenness of their IT suppliers. There's one more option. You could also incorporate a green clause in all your RFPs (request for proposal), and 19% of our respondents have done just that. This would automatically ensure that your vendor offers you the most power and eco-friendly equipment.

Determine the ROI
Once you've audited the power consumption of various parts, it's time to find out how much power can be saved if you replace them with more energy efficient equipment. When it comes to data centers, the equation is slightly more complex. You not only have to determine the energy consumption of equipment like servers, you also have to determine the efficiency of air-conditioning to keep them cool.

Not only that, but server density also needs to be taken into account, which is increasing in most data centers, thanks to technologies like blade servers. Higher server density produces more heat, which further requires precision air-conditioning.

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