Green IT: managing to do more with less

IT managers may not be used to thinking of themselves as eco-warriors. But government strategies and NHS carbon reduction targets mean they need to start taking green issues on board. Andrew Donoghue reports.

IT equipment today accounts for 10 per cent of the UK's total electricity consumption. To put it another way, that’s four nuclear power stations worth. So IT professionals have a pivotal role to play when it comes to combating climate change.

A recent Cabinet Office report, Greening Government ICT, set out the challenge facing the public sector in this regard. It argued that technology should eventually help to improve the sustainability of whole organisations, by supporting initiatives like remote working. However, as most IT professionals are painfully aware, big changes in working patterns have yet to happen - while the demand on and requirement for new IT systems is growing exponentially.

The same government that signed up for the Climate Change Bill, which seeks a 60 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050, has also earmarked £12 billion for the National Programme for IT in the NHS (NPfIT).

While some cynics might say that 2050 will have come and gone before the NPfIT is actually completed, it's clear that NHS IT departments are going to have to implement any green IT strategy against a backdrop of ever increasing demand on computing infrastructure. As the targets get nearer, they may also find themselves facing tighter legislation and tighter budgets.

Energy ignorance

Indeed, although some independent frameworks are emerging, such as the US Energy Star rating system, and initiatives from Green Grid and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, the lack of clear metrics for measuring the environmental impact of IT is one of the most serious challenges for any IT department looking to implement a green IT strategy.  

"The most striking takeaway from our research into energy efficiency to date is the need for better science, precision, measurement and reporting," says Andy Lawrence, research director for eco-efficient IT at industry analysts The 451 Group. "It is the lack of rigour in these areas that has given many marketing departments the opportunity to ‘greenwash’ their products and make claims that are difficult to substantiate and sometimes plain wrong."

 Greening the data centre with virtualisation

Despite this, most IT vendors have woken up to the desire for more efficient hardware and software from their customers. And for many IT departments, the first stop when it comes to improving the efficiency of their IT operations is the data centre. The GAP report, An Inefficient Truth, estimated that just one medium-sized server has roughly the same annual carbon footprint as an SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon.

Although it dates back to the mainframe heyday of the 1980s, virtualisation is one of the technologies being promoted by vendors for its ability to improve data centre efficiency. Virtualisation consolidates server hardware and consequently drives up the pitiful industry average utilisation rate of less than 40 per cent per server.

In a virtualised facility, software breaks the link between hardware and the operating system, allowing multiple virtual machines to run on one physical machine. Each physical machine can therefore run at full capacity, handling multiple software functions which might previously have been spread across several physical servers. Microsoft is one of several vendors offering virtualisation tools: the software that creates the virtual machines and allows IT managers to control them.

Not only is virtualization green, it’s also a money saver. According to the 451 Group’s report, Eco-Efficient IT, each server eliminated as a result of virtualisation can reduce power consumption in a data centre by 200 to 400 watts. This equates to around $380 per year, when accounting for factors like air conditioning to cool the unit. "If a data centre has 1,000 servers, and just a third are eliminated, this represents annual savings of $125,400," the report states.

More environmental initiatives for the green IT manager

Other steps that IT departments can take to improve the efficiency of data centres include:

• Green procurement: organisations should seek out new servers that run at approximately 60 to 70 per cent utilisation rates. This can have dramatic and multiplying benefits for a data centre's energy consumption. 
• Rigorous decommissioning: removing equipment when it becomes redundant or inefficient has obvious and immediate benefits, but many organisations fail to do even this relatively simple kind of audit. 
• Disposal strategies - organisations should comply with directives and legislation such as Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS). 
• Modelling: it is possible to work out an accurate picture of how energy costs relate to floor space and arrangement of infrastructure. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis can determine how many more servers can go into a data centre, where they should be located and whether any changes need to be made to an air-conditioning system. 
   

Buy-in from all levels

Of course, a significant amount of IT infrastructure lies outside a data centre and, quite literally, in the hands of end-users. Educating non-IT staff across the organisation about green IT practices - such as powering down machines at night, avoiding unnecessary printing and properly disposing of hardware - is another key responsibility for the IT department.

However, that means that it is only if everybody is on board, from the trust chief executive down, that the IT department can hope to accomplish the big ask at the heart of any green IT strategy - a lot more productivity, from a lot less power.