Green is clean

Schneider Electric’s Neil Rasmussen outlines how organisations can make the right ‘green’ decisions.

The typical server is responsible for roughly 2.5 tons of CO₂ per year, which means every two servers have approximately the same environmental impact as the average car. This is an interesting fact, but today it is very difficult to incorporate this concept into IT decision making. How can we encourage green IT decisions? One of the most effective ways to drive change in organisations is to express the problem in financial terms. When we consider that an average server is responsible for an electrical energy cost of about €1500 per year, and over half this energy cost is typically wasted, the environmental problem transforms into a financial opportunity.

There are many aspects to 'green IT', including data centre water consumption, embedded carbon, equipment disposal and energy use. Over time, regulations and technology shifts will address these problems. For most of these problems, it is difficult for a single organisation to justify working on them in a meaningful way. Energy use, however, is the one area where organisations can take short-term actions that generate immediate financial returns. Organisations typically waste energy for IT in four different ways:

• They have IT resources online that should be retired
• They have IT resources that are grossly underutilised
• They have IT hardware that was not selected based on its energy efficiency
• They have power and cooling systems that are consuming more power than the IT equipment itself and are improperly configured, sized, or operated

When we consider that IT energy use is a substantial portion of the carbon footprint of many organisations, the improvement of IT energy efficiency becomes a profitable way to reduce carbon emissions. One of the frustrations that many executives have with initiatives related to IT is that huge upfront investments are required, and these investments are justified based on projected future returns that are difficult to measure and often unrealised. Fortunately, many of the opportunities related to IT energy savings actually cost very little or are even free, and the savings can be measured almost immediately. While many high-impact, low-cost energy improvement opportunities are available during the planning of a new data centre, existing data centers typically also have shocking inefficiency of energy use. Executives need to set the right tone or targets regarding efficiency improvements, but in general will need to rely on the skills of their staff to implement specific strategies to optimise the efficiency of IT operations.

However, there are three important policies that executives can and should implement to drive reductions in energy use of IT. First, a policy should be established that IT decisions must explicitly include the cost of energy in all total cost analysis. When energy costs are properly included, many decisions such as server retirement, IT hardware selection/purchasing, and virtualisation become more obvious or more urgent. Second, policies of server standardisation should be implemented. This standardisation will facilitate ongoing virtualisation programmes, as well as improve the planning, design, and efficiency of power and cooling systems. Third, this require all data centres to report the efficiency of the power and cooling infrastructure, using the industry standard PUE or DCiE metrics, and establish an ongoing programme of continuous improvement. One of the great problems with IT energy use is that it is generally invisible. Making energy visible in the IT decision processes, as well as visible in the day-to-day operations of the data centre, is the first step executives should take in preparing their organisations for a greener IT future.

Neil Rasmussen is the Senior VP 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. He received his BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from MIT.