Cover Story
 Green Back
Green IT is showing signs of maturing as technologies that blur the line between green and efficient take root
By Tabrez Khan
Green computing tops the list of technology buzzwords in the world of enterprise IT today. It is used to convey a range of technologies, IT architectures and approaches that basically make IT less polluting, more energy efficient, and have the capability of dealing efficiently with e-waste.
Global consulting firm Mckinsey estimates that 2 percent of all global carbon emissions are contributed by data centers, the lifeline of corporate IT. This figure is likely to increase to 3 percent by 2020—not a trivial figure by any count. No wonder there’s pressure on enterprise IT leaders to adopt measures that make IT greener.
However, it’s not just emissions or carbon footprints that are making organizations sit up and take notice. Green IT is not only an environmental prerogative but also an economic imperative given the depleting energy resources on the one hand and the huge potential for cost savings by going green on the other.
According to research agency IDC, energy and cooling expenses of organizations will grow eight times faster than the purchasing costs of new servers through 2010. Critical data center limitations (such as shortage of floor or rack space) are already forcing organizations to look at software or outsourcing alternatives like virtualization software, cloud computing and software-as-a-service which are greener in nature than conventional IT.
Green IT practices such as data center virtualization, better data center design and layout, and asset lifecycle management, which reduce the need for Capex, are becoming increasingly important as IT budgets remain constrained.
Data centers
According to estimates, IT consumes as much as 50 percent of all energy used by an organization, and is also a source of significant carbon emissions. Since a sizable portion of the power bill arises because of the data center and IT, energy efficiency is no longer the concern of only the facilities manager. Rather, CIOs are being called upon to demonstrate how they are optimizing the use of energy by IT equipment within and outside the data center.
Green IT begins at the data center design stage itself. “Optimizing data center design and cooling strategies can lead to more efficient use of energy and space. Airflow management using computational fluid dynamics for visualization helps to optimize and manage airflow without the installation of any additional computer room air-conditioners. Liquid cooling reduces cooling energy consumption by 50 percent or more, cuts the data center space requirement by 55 percent, and offers complete differential return on investment within a year,” says Manish Bhatnagar, Vice President, Cooling Solutions Division, APW President Systems.
Consolidating IT infrastructure inside data centers is another step toward greening IT. Cisco, which introduced its unified computing system (UCS) last year, is a strong proponent of this approach. Cisco’s UCS solution unites computing, networking, storage access and virtualization into a cohesive system. “This works to reduce the total cost of ownership at the platform, site and organizational levels, and also to increase IT staff productivity and business agility through just-in-time provisioning and mobility support. The system reduces data center power consumption by 33 percent. Besides, complexity is reduced because a single wire connects to the SAN or LAN, and companies can achieve 40 percent savings in infrastructure and zero downtime operations,” says VC Gopalratnam, CIO, Cisco Globalization, and VP, Information Technology, Cisco.
IBM’s Project Big Green is perhaps the leading example of the efficacy of data center optimization in energy savings and green IT. The project is a roadmap that IBM developed for itself and its customers to help measure, understand and take action to address the IT energy situation. With an annual investment of $1 billion, IBM hopes to save more than five billion kW of energy per year in power and cooling requirements. In addition, the company will double the computing capacity of its own data centers within three years without increasing its power consumption or carbon footprint.
Big Blue has a portfolio of modular data center products with varying levels of energy savings potential, and it has replicated its own success with green IT, although on a smaller scale, at customer premises. “We worked with Kotak Mahindra Bank to deploy a 7,000 sq ft green data center. IBM won this deal over 14 other competitors by demonstrating a cost savings of nearly $1.2 million over five years in operational efficiency. This data center is also among the most power-efficient in the country,” says Akash Saxena, Country Manager, Infrastructure Services, IBM.
Virtualization
Virtualization has become a key piece in the green computing story because it aids the more efficient use of hardware resources and reduces infrastructure and energy consumption. Server virtualization allows organizations to replace multiple physical servers with a single physical server that runs several virtual machines inside itself. This reduces consumption of data center space as well as cooling and energy costs, and increases server utilization by as much as 80 percent.
“Switching to virtualization means cutting down on not just the number of servers and related IT hardware, but also on real estate, power and cooling requirements, thus making for massive savings,” says Ganesan Arumugam, Director, Partner Sales, VMware India.
He says it’s not just the big businesses with huge server farms that are benefiting from virtualization-induced cost savings and efficiency. “Chitale Dairy, a dairy farm in Maharashtra, is an example of the benefits a medium or small business can hope to gain by adopting green IT. With the help of virtualization, Chitale achieved a 50 percent reduction in its heating and cooling costs, consolidated 10 physical servers to three, and improved the efficiency of its IT systems.” The consolidation at Chitale was effected by VMware’s products.
Mumbai-based jeweler Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri (TBZ), another VMware customer, boosted its server utilization from 3-4 percent to 70 percent after embracing green IT. VMware’s vSphere 4.0 implementation helped TBZ consolidate from 35 servers to a mere four even while enhancing utilization and efficiency.
Server
virtualization also helped to increase TBZ’s uptime from 70 percent to 98 percent.
It’s this proven cost-savings and increase in efficiency that’s making organizations across the globe adopt virtualization. By 2012, Gartner predicts there will be four million virtual machines installed on x86 servers, making it the most significant high-impact infrastructure trend in corporate IT.
Desktop virtualization is another emerging technology which is green and is making deep inroads into corporate IT. Gartner has predicted that the number of virtualized PCs would grow from the less than five million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011. This augurs well for green IT since traditional PC desktops seem to represent a far larger cost center in terms of real cost and green impact than a data center.
Comments Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, Citrix Systems, India Subcontinent, “The desktop, with all its accompanying networked computing devices such as printers and copiers, may turn out to be the bigger green IT challenge. With a single network server supporting only about 200 devices, energy consumption in the data center will escalate as these machines continue to proliferate. Further, each device draws a lot of power on its own, even when in sleep or standby mode, thus consuming more energy. When scaled to thousands of users, the power bill really adds up.”
Server-based desktop virtualization solutions offer energy and cost savings similar to those experienced in server consolidation. One of the greatest benefits of server virtualization is the energy saved when many servers running multiple application loads at low utilization rates are combined into one physical piece of hardware. Because server-based virtual desktops run from the data center, power savings are two-fold. First, server-based virtual desktops allow organizations to further consolidate and save on power and cooling in the data center. Second, since most virtual desktop client devices have much smaller power footprints than their PC counterparts—as little as 4W versus over 150W for a traditional PC—organizations save power on the desktop.
“Desktop virtualization allows you to reduce the computing power needed on the desktop and to broaden your options when purchasing new client devices such as the new low-power alternatives,” says Deshmukh. “We also deliver application virtualization, which enables applications to run independent of the operating system, taking the actual computing device out of the equation. Applications are delivered, not installed, sending only what’s needed for interaction with the application, and diverting all the processing power back to the data center for optimal energy efficiency.”
Green communications
Software-based unified communications (UC), which has the potential to be a substitute for business travel, is environment-friendly and can save a lot in travel cost and time.
Tele-presence, video-conferencing and UC allow companies to collaborate and communicate in realtime while generating a fraction of the emissions associated with business travel. The cost savings and emission reductions are substantial when compared to business travel by corporate executives.
Autodesk, a company which develops design software for engineering companies, has calculated that business travel by its employees was responsible for 36,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2007. That figure was more than half of its total carbon emissions. According to the non-profit Climate Group (which counts global high-tech companies and governmental and non-governmental organizations among its members), low-carbon substitutions could reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide by nearly 500 megatons a year.
Says Gopalratnam, “Cisco’s TelePresence technology creates life-like, in-person experiences between individuals, businesses and events for meetings over the network, and helps reduce the carbon footprint generated by traveling to essential face-to-face meetings.”
Partner play
According to Forrester, a third of the companies surveyed by it are now using green criteria in their IT purchasing decisions, a figure which has been steadily climbing upward. But with these decisions come the expectation of reduced costs.
While the trend shows that vendors across product lines are going in for more eco-friendly products, it has had a cascading effect on partners as well as on solutions providers who help customers to reduce power and ownership cost. According to Gartner, there has been a significant increase in storage demand in the country from one petabyte in 2001 to more than 34 petabytes by 2007; this has resulted in the increasing uptake of storage by data centers. Gartner also predicts that the total data center area in India will reach 5.1 million sq ft by 2012.
Explains Deshmukh: “Companies are investing in additional data centers to meet or enhance disaster recovery and business continuity requirements, so green IT is also about making a tangible impact at the data center and server level. This gives partners a great opportunity to talk to their customers and enable them to go green.”
The need for environmental sustainability has created a new set of challenges for IT. IT managers must now measure power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across the organization to reduce the environmental impact of business operations. They must manage the power consumption of disparate networks and IT assets with a common view and set of policies. “Depending on the size of the business, the challenges can be different. Most small and medium-sized businesses have neither the expertise nor the resources to invest in green IT solutions; they need guidance and support from partners. On the other hand, large enterprises need advice about best practices and innovation opportunities,” says Gopalratnam.
Partners who recognize the need for green IT solutions in the market and who can design and deploy solutions that help to address this need definitely stand to gain a lead in the market.
Green PCs
Vendors of PCs and building blocks have started offering products which not only save energy costs but also reduce environmental impact through smaller carbon footprints.
For instance, microprocessor vendors Intel, AMD and Via are increasingly shipping parts that use lower power ratings and offer higher performance per watt. “Awareness about low-energy processors already exists among enterprise and corporate customers, but there’s less awareness among SMBs and other customers,” says Rajesh Gupta, Director, Sales, Intel India.
However, these processors are not very popular, one reason being that they are expensive. Typically, a desktop processor clocking speeds of 65W or 90W is cheaper by almost 20-30 percent than a more energy-efficient processor clocking 45W. Arvind Chandrasekhar, General Manager Business, AMD India, says that “to increase the adoption of energy-efficient processors, AMD is now offering energy-efficient processors that clock at 45W at a premium of just 12-15 percent.”
Since processors play the biggest role in reducing energy efficiency, both vendors and systems builders are cutting down energy costs by using components that draw less power. One example: using notebook drives instead of the normal 3.5-inch desktop drives.
“We have recently launched our nettops which we believe are the thinnest in the world,” informs Harish Kumar RP, CEO of the Bengaluru-based Connoisseur Electronics. “They use just 20W of power and are powered by an Intel Atom processor. We have cut corners on power consumption by using notebook drives. The product uses a power adaptor normally seen in netbooks, not a regular 200W SMPS.” Harish expects to sell 300-400 nettops a month.
Sunil Kumar, CEO of Lampo Computers, Bengaluru, points out that “you can further save energy costs by switching to a solid state drive, which can help to bring down energy costs by as much as 50 percent. But as of today this drive is four times more expensive than a normal hard drive.”
PC manufacturers have also launched specific models targeted at energy-conscious users. For instance, Wipro is selling its AMD Geode-based Protos energy-efficient PC through channels; it promises carbon footprints of less than 15 percent. HP has launched the HP Compaq dx2009 desktop which uses a Via C3 processor and is priced less than Rs 10,000 without a monitor; it uses a power adaptor. Acer has launched its Acer Revo, while Dell has models such as Optiplex 960 and Zino (which is styled like a Mac Mini).
Delhi-based Netweb Technologies has launched servers based on Atom processors based on Super Micro motherboards. “We have seen surprisingly huge traction for these servers, where the norm is usually using faster processors. Server appliance vendors—users who need to run appliances 24x7x365—have started buying these products,” says Sandeep Lodha, director of Netweb.
Carbon trading
As if the long list of incentives for IT to go green wasn’t enough, the government seems determined to introduce legislation that penalizes energy guzzling and emission-spewing by IT infrastructures.
“Global regulations like the Kyoto Protocol mean that India is increasingly aligning with the global effort to curb emissions and make industry toe the green line,” remarks Sanjay Motwani, Regional Manager, India and Middle East, Raritan. “Efforts on the regulatory front to curb the environmental impact of industrial activity seem to have increased. The government recently announced plans to launch the world’s first market for trading in energy savings. It has also formed a national policy group to focus on data center energy efficiency, to develop a national design code for energy conservation in data centers, and to come out with a best practice manual for Indian data centers in consultation with industry.”
Regulation is also underway to fine companies that are high on emissions and do not have enough carbon credits. Carbon trading—which mandates companies to buy credits to cover their carbon generation while simultaneously providing energy-efficient companies the opportunity to sell carbon credits—has grown exponentially over the last few years. Globally, the market was worth US $64 billion in 2007; India, along with Brazil, has the second-largest market share of 6 percent.
With 930 carbon credit projects already on, and 180 more expected to be added each year, the government estimates carbon trading to become a lucrative $100 billion opportunity.
Still, India remains the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and as calls for tighter environmental regulation grow shriller, Indian industry is likely to feel the pinch. |