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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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;
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.
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
|
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