Bill Gates predicted many years ago of a PC in every home. He was widely
considered to be simply promoting an unlikely scenario with the aim of boosting
Microsoft's profits. However, how right he truly was. Not just at
home but also virtually every commercial organisation of any size is heavily
reliant upon IT. At home there is little we can do regarding our use of
IT, other than not leaving our PC's switched on uneccessarily, but for
organisations there is massive scope for affecting energy use, recycling, the
public image, and profits through adopting a green approach to IT.
IT Executives are at last coming under increasing pressure to deliver a Green IT or Green
Computing Strategy. Executive boards are finally recognising there can be a
genuine competitive advantage in adopting green issues and signing up to a low carbon
emissions footprint and this is not a policy only for do-gooders or those with
little other commercial pressures. Having a Green IT Strategy can directly
affect the view of the organisations customers. Customers will clearly
continue to evaluate suppliers based on product/service offerings and their
costs, however, if all else is equal, then choosing a supplier with a low carbon
policy can be a key differentiator. Most people do want to support green
issues and adopting suppliers with low-carbon strategies helps buyers to feel
good about their decisions.
Green IT also brings with it direct cost benefits for the organisation, making it
an easier sell to the more sceptical boards of directors. With a Green
Computing or IT Strategy we can reduce equipment, power, air-conditioning, and
support costs. This applies throughout the enterprise not just in data-centres or our server rooms
but desktop computers as well.
Let's look at some objectives we might want to achieve through adopting a Green
IT Strategy...
Core objectives for a Green IT Strategy could include: -
- Minimising energy consumption from the IT estate
- Purchasing green energy and using green suppliers
- Reducing the paper and other consumables used
- Minimising equipment disposal requirements
- Reducing travel requirements for employees/customers
Let's take each of these targets in turn and consider some typical options for
inclusion in our computing strategy.
Newer equipment can be a way of easily reducing energy consumption requirements.
New PCs, Servers, infrastructure equipment and printers typically consume far
less energy and have better power management features.
Virtualise the servers and desktops. The old model of dedicated physical
hardware to support server applications and services can now be replaced with
virtualisation technology to create logical separation or services but without physical
separation. Basically you can use virtualisation software to carve up your
single server into 5 or 10 virtual servers. There are many benefits to
virtualising your IT such as faster DR recovery, platform standardisation
reducing support costs but from a Green IT Strategy perspective we are most
interested in reducing the number of servers required, and hence power
consumption. How far you can virtualise machines varies on the types of
applications and services running, but typical infrastructure servers can
normally be reduced by over 80% in terms of numbers of boxes.
Having decided that our Green Computing Strategy should include virtualising our
server estate, let's look at the plethora of PCs deployed throughout the
enterprise. Using virtualisation again we can replace PCs with
terminals providing substantial savings in power consumption, purchase an
operational costs. Hang on, I hear you say, my users would be horrified at
the prospect of losing their PC's. This is a normal first reaction but in reality they will realise a number of
benefits and can soon come around. We recommend you get buy-in from users
early on, and this can most easily be done with a small scale pilot. Users
concerns typically relate to information security,
personalisation, and devices such as printers, DVD burners. The truth is
they still have their PC but it now runs on a server instead. Better still
it can follow them around the organisation, is as secure as it ever was, and can
even be accessed across a WAN so remote workers or even executives on holiday
can gain access to their very own PC. Devices such as DVD's and CD's can
be plugged into most terminals so again, that need not be a concern.
Reliability is massively improved as we are now running on server equipment and
the desktop suite now can directly benefit from resillience and DR strategies
you have in place for the server farms. There are a variety of suppliers
for virtualisation, the most established being VMWare, but many other
organisations such as Microsoft are investing heavily in developing their
offerings.
As well as minimising our energy consumption we need to ensure any energy we do
consume is generated in an eco-friendly manner, i.e. it is renewable. Most
suppliers of energy offer green enery options, or you can switch suppliers. Comparison sites such as green.energyhelpline.com can provide
independent guidance.
Most Green IT Strategies include promoting better eco-friendly work practices
within the organisation. Reducing consumables such as paper and inks or
toners saves costs as well as reducing waste. Top policies to include
within your strategy include: -
- Add a standard email footer asking people not to print unnecessarily
- Change default printer settings to be double sided printing
- Replace older printers with more efficient devices such as MFPs
- Replace faxes with paperless solutions such as fax-to-email
- Replace copiers with scanners (scan and email)
- Replace memos and paper information distribution with an intranet
- Switch customer and supplier communications to email and extranet systems such
as e-billing, e-purchasing
- Recycle toners
The recent WEEE directive (see wikipedia for more information)
provides a framework under which the onus for old equipment disposal falls to
the vendor or the new equipment, and that equipment disposal must be in an
eco-friendly manner. We can minimise the ongoing disposal requirements by
minimising our purchasing, but your new green computing strategy is likely to
require some replacement of existing technology in the first instance.
There are many organisations that can dispose of your equipment for you normally
at a nominal cost.
This can be one of the hardest nuts to crack as it involves fundamental culture
change, but can offer substantial benefits and cost reductions. Clearly
many employees need to come into work, but many do not and can work more
effectively from home, or in smaller satelite facilities. With virtualised
desktops, they can effectively access their PC's from home. Meetings can
be replaced with conference calls, and as internet access speeds improve we can
expect the return of video conferencing. Web-cams are cheap and bandwidth
is readily available, so we can send data, voice and video over the internet
creating virtual meetings and offices.
For customers, consider if you can reduce the requirement for customers to visit
you by providing more information and services on-line.