Green IT: Feeling the heat

Sudesh Prasad

The global computing network, according to a statistics, consumes more than 100 bn kW of electricity, which translates to a whopping $7.2 bn. Power consumption by data centers has also doubled between 2000 and 2005. In fact, out of the total IT budget, the cost of energy is around 25 percent, which is quite a percentage.

Though IT is a smaller contributor to global warming, the number of devices, equipment, and other related things are increasing fast, especially in emerging economics. Apart from business implications, these phenomena have large implications for the overall environment. The situation is no different in India, considering that businesses are growing across all verticals, especially IT/ITeS, with India becoming one of the largest emerging economies of the world.

According to the latest Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of CIOs, Indian firms have reported stronger than average increase in IT budgets (13 percent as compared to the world average of 3.3 percent) for 2008. The report links the increased spending by Indian CIOs to the requirement of building new business capabilities, with 30 percent of IT spend allocated for business growth and 19 percent for business transformation.

The report also suggests that Indian firms spend their budgets more on hardware and software, than on people. All this growth will have widespread energy implications, and enterprises, together with IT vendors, are gearing up to address the issue by going for state-of-the-art technology and consolidating their existing infrastructure.

What drives Green IT?

The computing requirements have grown so much nowadays that organizations have started going for data centers. According to IDC, it is projected that between 2000 and 2010, the installed base of servers will grow six times, while storage is expected to grow sixty-nine times. Every piece of this equipment drives the need for more energy. This is a lot of incremental capacity installed on the data center floors.

At the same time, server utilization rates on Wintel are about 3-10 percent and Unix about 20-30 percent. In the past, CEOs were not quite aware of how much power they were consuming, or how much cooling they were imposing on their machines.

Energy use is increasing, but we also know what is happening with energy costs. They are increasing as well. In the US, commercial electricity rates have increased by 10% during the past year. As energy usage and energy costs increase, we see the combined effect on our IT operational budgets. Some analysts estimate that energy costs make up to 40 percent of the total operational costs of a data center. Whether the CIO is paying for this today or not (as it may be buried under facilities), it is a big bill and is going up every year.

Lifecycle mismatch

What creates a mismatch is that we have data centers that were built for ten-fifteen years of life, but are supporting technologies that change every two-three years. This mismatch can put tremendous stress on infrastructure, which is called on to support the differences in the capabilities and needs of the data center.

Some consultants indicate that any data center older than five years is technically obsolete because it is not designed to support current technologies such as blades. For example: if rack-enclosed blades are put on a typical data center floor that was designed to cool 1-3 kW of heat, the rack of blades will spit out 20-30 kW of heat. So, it is trying to cool 20-30 kW of heat instead of cooling only 1-3 kW in the same space. There is clearly a mismatch between data center capabilities and the technologies they are required to support.

Starting point

Enterprises should have a re-look at their infrastructure and see how they can consolidate. Today, technologies are available that can be virtualized to avoid procurement of multiple machines. Even the existing ones can be virtualized by using the tools available. It also makes sense to start looking at powerful, latest machines which are not only performance-oriented but are much better in saving power. Most enterprises buy machines according to their needs.

Apart from savings on power and cooling, companies can also save on management costs. Simply put, the lesser the number of machines, the better the manageability. Because there is lower power consumption and better cooling, the failure rates of machines are low.

For some companies, say, those with less than five computers, green may not make much sense. But for data centers with more than twenty-five computers, it makes sense to have a mechanism in place to save on power and cooling.

Enterprises are talking about consolidation to improve manageability and efficiency. But when you add more servers in the data center, the center becomes big, consumes more power, occupies more space, and emits more heat. Therefore, there is a need for technologies or solutions that can reduce these factors.

The usage of blade servers is a way out as they consume less power and take less rack space. Enterprises can also think in terms of breaking the data center into multiple units. In fact, the dependence on IT is increasing and companies are using more automation. As global warming is a concern for one and all, companies are trying to reduce energy usage as it has a direct impact on energy. Vendors are also spending a lot of money on research and development (R&D).

The same has happened in terms of form factors. Earlier, large form factors of devices were not as energy efficient as the current trend of small form factors. Vendors are spending a lot of money on technologies to reduce power consumption in products. Any element that goes to a data center is being scrutinized on how energy efficient it is.

Vendor selection

Today, all vendors claim that they can help in setting up eco-friendly data centers. But from the customers point of view, it is important that they go for a vendor who can demonstrate their capability, rather than engaging in mere talk.

The components that make eco-friendly data centers are also crucial because although on paper there may be several claims on how they can build the data center using specific knowledge, but not having the right technology will not help. Whether it is processor, memory, hard disk, or monitor, companies need a technology that is capable of contributing to eco-friendly data centers.

Above all, the vendor should be able to demonstrate whether their products actually consume less power. There is also a need to find whether IT hardware vendors are working with cooling companies to offer a solution that helps reduce energy consumption.