Green compliance
Many companies have been working to reduce their carbon emissions over recent years. Ignoring the environmental benefits, being green makes excellent business sense in terms of reducing costs and meeting customer expectations. However, until now the drive has been purely optional. Starting next year, this will no longer be the case, as new legislation is being introduced that is intended to make carbon reduction a priority. Under the terms of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) around 10,000 large organisations will need to buy carbon allowances to cover their carbon emissions. At the end of each year, the companies in the scheme will receive either a bonus or a penalty based on how well they have performed. Currently, the scheme will affect only larger organisations - roughly speaking, those companies with an annual electricity bill of more than £500,000 a year in the UK.
Even if your company won’t be affected by this initial part of the legislation, the rising cost of electricity makes it well worth working out how you can minimise your emissions and at the same time save money for better uses.
The first step in being greener is to gain an effective understanding of the current carbon footprint of your IT infrastructure. The Carbon trust has a carbon footprint calculator
If you want a more direct calculation of efficiency of your data centre, the Green Grid has a white paper for calculating Data Centre infrastructure Efficiency and Power Usage Efficiency. The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centres and business computing ecosystems, and has some excellent advice on working out what IT infrastructures really use in carbon terms, and how to minimise that use.
Growing in a green way
While you can see the task of being more carbon efficient as a cost to your company, it also represents an opportunity. If you choose modern energy efficient equipment, you will reduce your electricity bill along with your carbon emissions, and also benefit from having modern equipment. You can find comparisons of PCs, laptops and monitors at Epeat, and while this is aimed at the United States, much of the information on manufacturers and models is relevant in the UK: http://www.epeat.net/
Even if you don’t want to buy new equipment, there are ways to make your IT infrastructure use energy more efficiently, starting with shutting down equipment when not in use. For example, according to the Carbon Trust, a typical desktop and associated IT equipment averages about 160W per work location, and in a typical open plan office, around 15W/M2. If the IT equipment is left on all the time, it will use around 66KWh per M2 per year. This would result in the production of around 34kg of CO2 per year. If the IT equipment were switched off when not in use, that figure would drop to 7.5kg of CO2 per year, assuming an eight hour working day and a 48 week working year.
While it is possible to persuade your users to turn off their equipment, it’s more effective to use the facilities of the PCs hardware and software to do it automatically. If you use Windows Vista, you can set the power management options of your PCs via Group Policy to set timeouts for the monitor, hard disk, sleep and hibernate settings. Windows Vista also offers the advantage that the Sleep mode is now on by default, and a desktop PC will enter Sleep mode after being inactive for 60 minutes. However, whichever desktop operating system you use, you can reduce carbon emissions and have smaller electricity bills by having a policy to turn off machines when not in use.
Virtualisation is another tool in your green armoury. You can make more efficient use of existing equipment, especially servers. If you consolidate from several servers to one, you can have just one physical machine using electricity and producing CO2 instead of several. Repeat this process across your enterprise and the difference can be substantial.
Green Data Centres
The data centre is a key area for improving energy efficiency. In addition to the virtualisation just mentioned, there are a range of steps you can take such as improving the air management to isolate hot and cold air streams; optimising cooling plants including “free” cooling; improving power supplies and UPS systems; and installing direct liquid cooling of racks. If you are considering any heating and cooling improvements, don’t forget that there are 100% capital allowances available under the Enhanced Capital Allowances (ECA) scheme for energy-saving technologies. You can find details of what equipment is included in the Energy Technology List (ETL) which is managed by the Carbon Trust at www.carbontrust.co.uk. There are good resources on how to build a green data centre in TechNet Magazine. Berkeley Labs has also produced a Best Practices document for datacentres.
Change the way you work
Your IT infrastructure can help more directly in reducing your carbon footprint. Modern software makes it easy for business users to minimise their business travel, and even the need to commute to work. Working from home avoids the need for people to travel to and from the office, and the wide-spread availability of broadband connections means the remote worker can have the same access to corporate IT resources as they would from a local desk.
Business travel can also often be avoided by using video conferencing and online meeting software. It’s much more efficient to hold an hour long meeting from a local video conference room than it is to waste time and resources travelling to other locations.
When the University of Bradford monitored the savings made when BT employees switched to using audio and video conferencing, the figure came out at 860,000 meetings a year held online rather than having participants travel, saving 97,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. Respondents to the survey reported that each conference call saved a minimum 40kg of travel-related CO2, and that conservative calculations also suggested that each replaced meeting avoided travel and subsistence costs of at least £178, and freed up at least £120 of management time for more productive purposes.
Taken overall, by being aware of energy saving measures and by making effective use of technology, you can reduce the running costs of your IT infrastructure and help your organisation meet the needs of green legislation. You can find out more information from the newly launched Microsoft Environment website.
Related Links
• Microsoft Environment website
Subscribe
to feed
