Towards Leaner,Meaner & Greener IT Setup

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.

A few ways to go Green



Once you've done your ROI calculations and a reality check of your IT

infrastructure, you need to roll out your Green IT strategy. While there are

lots of things that can be done, we'll concentrate on a few relevant ones here.

Replace your CRT monitors with LCD



How many CRT monitors are there in your organization as against LCD

monitors? Replacing CRT with LCD is perhaps one of the first few steps to going

green, and not without good reason. It is said that a LCD monitor will pay for

itself in two years time, just out of the savings it brings in your electricity

bills. Since the life of a LCD monitor itself is much longer than two years,

this benefit is definitely worth it. Moreover, since the prices of LCD monitors

have dropped significantly, it can be considered as a replacement to CRTs much

more easily now. Plus of course, it offers so many other benefits, like it

occupies lesser table space, causes lesser eye-strain, and emits lower radiation

as compared to CRTs. So it definitely makes sense to replace your CRT monitors

with LCD monitors.

Interestingly, 38% of the respondents to our survey had already done this

activity.

Server virtualization



This is a trend that has really picked up momentum across the IT industry,

and is a key technique being touted for going green. Every organization today is

combating with the evils of server proliferation, or having too many hardware

servers in the data center. There's a server for just about every

application-mail, web, proxy, business apps, security, content management, file

serving, and so on. The sad part is that their average utilization hovers around

30-40%, if not less. And yet they continue to run 24x7 and consume energy even

when they're idle. So, in effect, you're paying the energy cost of servers,

which are idle almost 70% of the time. That's not a very pleasant thought

indeed, which is why the whole concept of server virtualization has become so

popular. It helps combat this very problem.

Virtualization technology allows you to abstract the hardware from the

software. So a server, which traditionally runs a single OS and application in

the data center, is able to run multiple OSs and apps simultaneously, thanks to

virtualization. This would allow you to load a single server with more

applications and increase its utilization. This reduces the number of servers in

the data center, and also helps you defer your server purchase.

If you find this hard to believe, then what would you say to the 60% of the

respondents, who plan to implement server virtualization in the near future as a

part of their green IT initiative? Server virtualization topped the charts as

far as future plans of going green by our respondents was concerned.

Use renewable energy sources



Why depend upon the standard energy source to power your IT equipment when

you can use alternate energy sources like wind, solar power, etc. It might be

too expensive to power an entire data center on wind power today, and solar

power may not be able to produce sufficient energy for the job. However, you can

use solar power for remote areas. In fact, one well known company, Mahindra and

Mahindra Financial Services Ltd, has started using solar power to power its

computers in remote villages.

Renewable energy sources are gradually gaining importance amongst

enterprises. In our survey, we found that 31% of the respondents had plans of

using such sources to power their computing needs in the near future.

Disposing Off obsolete IT products



While you might purchase equipment that's green, what would you do with the

old or obsolete equipment? Countries like the US are already coping with the

problems of e-waste. They're finding it difficult to dispose off their waste IT

products. Even Indian companies have begun facing this problem. For instance,

according to some preliminary statistics, around 30,000 PCs become obsolete

every year in Bangalore alone.

So what do you do with all the IT equipment that's become obsolete? 18% of

our respondents had no answer to this question, but actually, there are several

options available. It all depends upon the state of your IT equipment, and how

much of it do you have to dispose off. If you have lots of it, then it might be

better to auction it off. Or, there are many organizations who end up donating

their old PCs to schools who can't afford them. In fact, 33% of our respondents

said that they hand it over to charity and needy organizations. Another 31% said

that they sell it to a scrap dealer, while 19% said they auction it off.