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Towards a Greener IT

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) measured in 2010, was found to be

approximately 390 ppm (parts per million), with the upper safety limit of

atmospheric CO2 being 350 ppm. This means that there is a pressing need to bring

down the CO2 concentration as soon as possible to 350ppms to avert the dangers

of global warming.

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Are organizations proactively moving towards a greener IT?



Gartner estimates that global ICT industry accounts for approximately 2

percent of global CO2 emissions which includes the in-use phase of PCs, servers,

cooling, fixed and mobile telephony, local area network (LAN), office

telecommunications and printers. The datacenters that require energy to run

servers and provide cooling, account for almost a quarter of global emissions

from ICT.

Some organizations have picked up momentum towards Green IT mainly from CSR

perspective and due to drive from international customers. Butthere is a need to

gain better understanding of the full life cycle of ICT products and services,

and innovate to reduce environmental impact. This is currently not happening

because of the lack of a commercial or legislative need to do so. To put it

plain words, environmental concern does not seem to be enough to lead

organizations to move towards a greener IT.

Why should you develop a green IT strategy?



When an enterprise decides to go green backed by a strong green IT strategy,

there definitely is an upfront cost associated. But the ROI generated in the

long run, along with the idea of aligning your ever increasing IT infrastructure

along the 'green' line as early as possible, is worth all the investment. Also

an organization's green/sustainability policies are now increasingly developing

into a competitive differentiator in in the global market. When an industry

green policy followed in their company or factory and the mechanisms that they

have in place, it builds an extra level of trust and confidence in the mind of

the customers and stakeholders for the vendor as a responsible organizations

already up the curve. So it is becoming essential for the companies to make

environmental consideration an important part of their business decision making.

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Making your IT infrastructure green



The first step for any enterprise intending to move towards a greener IT is

a thorough audit of IT equipments and their energy consumption. This enables

them to evaluate the current resource consumption of existing IT architecture

and infrastructure and identify the best practices that could be adopted for

improving energy efficiency or reducing consumption. Some simple practices that

every organization can follow, for reducing the carbon footprints of the IT

infrastructure are being discussed below.

More notebooks; less carbon footprint

From the feedback that we receive from enterprises we understand that

on an average if an organization moves from a single desktop to a

laptop in an office environment it saves roughly Rs 6,000 of power

costs per year. If this is applied across a company's employees- it is

a huge saving. Apart from this, on an average 4 hours of additional

productivity is gained if you give a notebook to an employee.

R Ravichandran, Director Sales, Intel South Asia

Desktops and Laptops



Energy Star says that LCD monitors use on average 50 to 70% less energy in
on-mode than conventional CRT monitors. This is now a known fact and

organizations are replacing old CRT monitors with LCDs. But a new practice that

is being seen amongst enterprises, is providin employees with laptops which are

60-70% less energy consuming than desktops.Employee's need to work on the go is

also another reason for this trend. On the top of all this it leads to

significant decrease in carbon footprint. Energy saving trust UK says that if

everyone buying a new desktop computer in 2010 bought a laptop instead, we would

be generating almost 270,000 tonnes less CO2 per year.

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PC power management



Something that sounds simple but if done diligently, can lead to good power

and cost savings to a company and significant decrease in carbon footprints of

an organization. Gartner says that PC Power Management Activation Can save a

2,500-PC Organization More Than $40,000 a Year. Tools like Energy Star's free EZ

GPO and IE's NightWatchman software can be utilized by network administrator to

centrally control power management of desktops. Infosys has developed an

in-house application named Terminator and has rolled out on all desktops which

ensures that desktops are shut down either by the user or automatically at a

pre-defined time after working hours. This is enabling significant cost savings

to them.

Manage printer fleet



Enterprises seem to be neglecting the printing environment when it comes to

considering solutions for reducing paper consumption within the office. as they

do not seem to see an immediate benefit. But Gartner says actively managing

office printing can lead to a reduction of 10% to 30% in recurring spending on

document output. Also it reduces the annual paper costs by at least 30% by

selecting duplex printing as the default setting across the output fleet.

Utilizing many of the printer management software available, IT managers can

take charge, track and control printers that are scattered across the

organization and also retrieve a printer usage information to track who is

printing what, how often, etc and can be used to identify overactive users.

Collaborative tools



Using collaborative communication tools like Video Conferencing, Voice of

IP, TelePresence, Instant messaging  can considerably reduce travel needs

and enable teams to work virtually but effectively. Some of these solutions such

as Office Communicator are effective even with low bandwidth availability. These

not only bring down the carbon footprint but also expenses.

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Server Consolidation



Studies show that on every dollar spent on your server, 50-60 cents goes on

power and cooling costs. If 5 years back an organization was running 200 servers

on a single core in datacenters, today they can be consolidated onto 20 servers,

on multi-core based servers and get same work done. The benefits include with

reduced overall TCO, higher availability, saving close to 90% real estate and

90% power costs, thus reducing carbon footprints.

Mahindra Satyam

Implementing server

consolidation for their Data center and have reduced carbon emission

by 2k metric tonnes/yr and led to more than 70 % TCO reduction.

Venkat Kd, Vice President- Enterprise Business Solutions

Greener datacenters



Datacenters are one of the highly energy intensive component resulting in

high operational and maintenance costs. This can only be achieved by adopting

appropriate techniques in the infrastructure design and obtaining the products

and systems of high energy efficiency. A few best practices that can be adopted

to make a datacenter greener are;

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Adaptive Cooling Technology: This technology uses sensors for optimum

cooling, hence reduces the load, power consumption and lead to savings.



Geothermal exchange: Ground Source Heat Pump unit uses the earth as a heat sink,
reducing the energy consumption as compared to a conventional chiller. This too

leads to reduced operational and maintenance costs.

Earth Air tunnel (EAT): EAT system draws fresh ambient air for

delivery and reduces the overall load and capacity of the chiller. This

generally leads to around 6 degree Celsius reduction of fresh air temperature.

Lighting solutions: A datacentre can be designed by optimizing the

lighting design through modeling and simulation combined with energy efficient

LED and CFL lights.

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Solar Thermal solutions: Adopt solar thermal solution for usage within

the datacenter. Use the right materials while building a datacenter to reduce

cooling requirements , like using thermal insulated flooring and ceiling and

usage of aerocon blocks for building walls. Besides, install power utilization

monitoring systems to track and optimize power usage.

Responsible e-Waste management



With the impending e-Waste rules in India, redundant IT equipments of
enterprises would have to discontinue the practice of selling it off to the

scrap dealers. They would have to dispose it off under the product take back

programs offered by respective IT equipment vendors or to the

recyclers/re-processors registered with Central Pollution Control Board. As a

move towards greener IT, this is one of the most basic thing that an

organization can start off with.

How enterprises are moving towards green IT and the benefits they are

deriving

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Basant Kumar Chaturvedi, Senior Manager IT, Perfetti Van Melle
  • Switched to energy saving equipments like LCD, laptops, mobile computing

    and Energy rated desktops, laptops and thin clients.
  •  Promoted usage of smartphones for various computing needs to save

    upon usage of laptops and desktops. Currently access of SAP and other

    application is available on phones, which consumes less power
  •  Switching to green data center environment by making changes in

    architectural design and cooling through PAC has resulted in 10 - 20% savings

    on power and cooling.
  •  Recycling computer wastage under HP Planet Partners Return and

    Recycling program to save upon nature.
  •  Power saving settings for the entire domain to switch off the

    machine automatically if not utilized for more than 10 minutes
  •  Deployed Microsoft Unified Communication to facilitate chat, voice

    and video communication across offices. Connected 48 locations to save upon

    the cost of communication and traveling by 20% approx.
  •  Deployed Cisco WebEx to save upon the cost of traveling and enable

    collaboration. Trainings, Events, vendor meetings (India and offshore) and

    meetings across other countries offices organized. Conducted 3 international

    and 15 Domestic meetings in year 2008 & conducted 31 international and 02

    Domestic meetings in year 2009.
Ravinder Jain, CIO, Aircel
  • Cutting on travels by increased usage of VOIP, Video Conferencing and

    electronic document repository.
  • Use of lighting systems with LED sensors wherever possible to save on

    power.
  • Use of e-Portal for all the policies/and approval work flow cutting down

    paper usage.
  • Initial projection of spending on Green IT runs into Millions of rupees in

    next 3-5 years, but this initiative will reduce the carbon footprint of the

    data center by over 400 tons per year. Consolidation of Networking equipments

    to reduce the foot print of Data center was done.
  • EAT for fresh air intake, which will reduce total TR requirement by 20%.

    Deployed Geothermic technology to reduce operational and maintenance costs.

    Usage of Adaptive Cooling Technology to reduce load and hence savings accrued

    on operational costs using sensors for optimum cooling.
  • Religious use of blade servers for various applications, which are more

    energy efficient and smaller foot print.
  • Hibernating all CRTs/PCs etc, when PCs/Servers are not in use

Chellanamasivayam, VP, IT Networks & IS, iGATE

iGATE decided to review all possible sources of paper consumption in the

organization and emerged with a solution to curb paper consumption via printers.

Two tools that were deployed across the organization are:

Pcounter: A comprehensive printer accounting and management suite

which provided quota management for printouts. It tracked printer usage,

enforcement of printing account balances and quota for users and restricted the

number of pages in a single print job. It also led to accurate reports

generation based on users and provides print histories of users, printers.

Pstation: Pstation for security & confidentiality of output. Awareness

was created amongst the users on how to use secure printing by providing

credentials to the Pstation whenever they send a print. The user credentials

were integrated with Active Directory of the Domain and only on providing proper

credentials, the data shall be printed.

Benefits for Environment Average Page usage per month before deploying

the solution was 2,46,827 and after deployingement this reduced by 58%, to:

1,02,274 pages per month. Cost of implementation was Rs 3,12,000 and savings per

month was Rs 61,172, The ROI was generated within 5 months.

Amrita Premrajan

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