Green credentials

With organisations looking to improve their efficiencies and slash their carbon footprint, NEIL RASMUSSEN offers his expert advice on going ‘green’.

Will the global recession impact on organisation's 'green IT' efforts or do you take the reverse view that this is the ideal opportunity as CFOs look to slash expenditure?

NEIL RASMUSSEN. With many customers deferring major IT deployments and focused on controlling costs, this is an ideal time to undertake efforts to reduce energy expenses. Adjusting power and cooling infrastructure, retiring older servers, and driving server standards often have a short payback time and can recover data centre power, cooling, and physical space capacities, creating a solid foundation for future IT projects. For many customers, server virtualisation provides a large additional opportunity to free-up capacities and reduce power consumption. For most customers, reductions of 20 percent in IT related electrical consumption are easily obtained, and savings of 50 percent or more are commonly achieved.

What are the common mistakes people make with their attempts to reduce their technology carbon footprint?

NS. Due to the immaturity and lack of standards for assessing carbon footprint, IT professionals should, for now, focus on measured electrical energy savings. Success requires that an effective baseline energy consumption study be performed or it becomes difficult to assess accomplishments. Clarifying the boundaries between IT and non-IT energy consumption remains a point of confusion for most customers, and any assessment needs to be explicit on this.  Server virtualisation projects should always address power and cooling infrastructure in parallel with the IT changes; we find many virtualisation projects achieve much less energy savings than anticipated when the power and cooling infrastructure has not been adapted to the virtualised environment, and improvements that could have been easily made at low cost can be difficult or expensive after a virtualisation project is completed.

How are your products and services aiding companies to boost their 'green' credentials?

NS. We are proud to offer the most electrically efficient power and cooling equipment available; nevertheless, customers typically obtain the largest energy efficiency gains from the help we can provide in planning the infrastructure of new data centres and assessing and improving existing data centres. Simple choices in deployment geometry, sizing, power distribution, or configuration can result in dramatic changes in energy consumption. One of our goals is to 'build in' efficiency to our data centre reference designs to ensure that organisations operating smaller data centres on a small budget can be just as efficient and 'green' as enterprises like Google that have expert staff and operate very large data centres.

What are your predictions for this sector in the next few years and which industries will emerge ahead of the curve with their 'green' efforts?

NS. Green efforts in the IT space will focus on electrical energy consumption in the short term, because this is where the most substantial and cost effective environmental impact benefits can be obtained. Many existing data centres will undergo significant efficiency improvements that will extend their practical life. For new data centres, the fundamentally inefficient traditional raised-floor cooled data centre design will disappear, as hot-aisle containment and free-air cooling become standard practice. Over the next few years, as the efficiency of data centres improves dramatically, we can anticipate a focus on the next key green IT objectives, which are water consumption and equipment end-of-life disposal. Improvements in all of these areas will be driven by vendors, and the most effective IT users be those who adopt emerging green management standards such as ISO-50001 Energy Management Standard rather than attempting to develop their own internal standards.

Neil Rasmussen is the SVP of Innovation for APC by Schneider Electric. His current research is focused on next generation high efficiency data centres.  He holds 17 patents related to data centre architecture and has published over 50 papers on that subject. Rasmussen received his BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from MIT.