If you’re serious about introducing sustainability in the “It actually cures many things at once,” says HSBC CIO Ken
workplace, the best place to start is with your IT department. Harvey. “It’s very green. You end up reducing office space, which
Eco Executive’s Philippa Norman looks at the costs and is helpful from a corporate expense standpoint. And actually,
benefits of making your system work more efficiently. human lifestyle is improved,”
H
ow often do you leave your PC on standby while you’re out The US-based IT consultancy Gartner estimates that ICT usage
for lunch? Multiply that by the amount of people based in accounts for approximately two per cent of all global CO2
your office alone and the level of energy wastage begins emissions. To put this into context, this figure is equivalent to total
to creep up to a worrying level. Add that to the light above your CO2 emissions generated by air travel, making the IT department
desk, your share of the air conditioning, and the amount of fuel an obvious area of focus when embarking on energy-saving, cost-
consumed travelling to and from the office, and by the end of cutting projects.
a working week, you and your co-workers have made sizeable
contribution to global emissions. If you have a guilty conscience Energy consumption in the data centre is predominantly driven by
then ‘green IT’ might just be your answer. servers and cooling. Energy-efficient servers are currently available
from major vendors, which they claim increase efficiency by as
Information and communication technology (ICT) is a fast-moving much as five times. Efficient processors from IBM, AMD and Intel
sector, but the environmental agenda is moving just as quickly. are already making their way into the mainstream, representing a
Although vital to the development of greener industrial, commercial significant step forward for green IT.
and residential processes, ICT has emerged to be as much a part
of the problem as the solution. Not surprisingly, market analysts predict rapid growth for green
technology as firms wake up to the huge benefits of greening up IT
The lifetime energy costs of powering and cooling servers, for departments. Although costly in initial investments, the payback in
example, are still overlooked by many ICT professionals, even terms of corporate image and cost efficiency makes the disruptive
though they are now as significant as the initial purchase costs. infrastructure restructuring process well worth the effort.
But, as businesses are coming under an increasing amount of
pressure to take a greener approach to overall operations, they In practice, the capacity used by a typical server or PC is configured
are looking at their IT departments from a different angle. ICT to be able to deal with peak loads. Research shows that a server
has stepped into the spotlight of late as a good place to kick often only utilises between five and 15 per cent of its capacity to
off any green spring-clean project. It has become clear that ICT service one application – a highly inefficient way of running things.
is no innocent party in the case of rising emissions. Staggering In order to optimise the capacity of infrastructure hosted by data
figures have shown that a rethink of the way an IT department is centres, solutions such as centralisation and virtualisation are
run could dramatically cut the energy consumption of an average becoming a viable option.
business, making big savings and at the same time boosting
green credentials. Virtualisation
The concentration of computing hardware in the average data Virtualisation is a proven software technology that is rapidly
centre is enormous and, outside manufacturing plants, accounts transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way
for the majority of commercial power consumption. They also that people interact with technology. Utilities now offer incentive
generate vast amounts of heat, making it necessary to utilise programmes for virtualisation, which reduces the number of
energy-guzzling cooling systems – a further expense to the pocket physical servers required in a workspace. This is by no means a
and the environment. new concept, but has seen fresh input of late driven by increasing
energy security fears and, of course, the feverishly hot topic of
According to international market analyst IDC, organisations will global warming.
spend an estimated $29bn globally this year to power and cool
IT systems, and the cost to power and cool the global-installed Today’s powerful hardware was originally designed to run only a
base of servers is projected to increase by 54 per cent over the single operating system and a single application, but virtualisation
next four years. Incorporate this with the overall cost of workspace breaks that bond, making it possible to run multiple operating
for each employee and it becomes clear why the general idea of systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the
green IT is becoming more popular. Sure, a large proportion of same time, increasing the utilisation and flexibility of hardware.
companies will be attracted to the cost-cutting benefits of such This can only be an example of logical progression for industry
a system, but, if it automatically brings environmental benefits, is and commerce.
the base motivation really an issue?
Such practical technology can benefit anyone who uses a
Green IT doesn’t simply focus on the installed equipment. computer, from independent IT professionals to government
It is an attitude, an overall approach to the running of an ICT organisations. It saves time, money and energy, while maximising
department. But this attitude is enabled by the technology itself. the productivity of existing hardware. What more could a business
Take teleconferencing, for example. It is no longer essential for want?
Mr Smith to travel to Heathrow airport by car to board a flight
to Frankfurt, and then catch a taxi to the city to represent his Basically, virtualisation lets you transform hardware into software.
firm at a meeting that is only likely to go on for an hour. With It uses specialist software to transform or “virtualise” the hardware
teleconferencing technology, he’s under no pressure to leave resources of a computer — including the CPU, RAM, hard disk
his office at all. Just think of the cost that saves the company, and network controller — to create a fully-functional virtual machine
and the energy consumption and carbon emissions it saves the that can run its own operating system and applications just like
planet. Mr Smith could even attend the meeting from home, a standard computer. Multiple virtual machines share hardware
saving the company the energy to power his workstation, and resources without interfering with each other, so you can safely
saving Mr Smith a painful commute to work, along with costly run several operating systems and applications at the same time
travel expenses. on a single computer.
21 | ecoexecutive
LEAD_spring clean.indd 21 18/4/08 15:27:55
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