'Green IT does not come free of cost'

Green evangelism was everywhere as expected at Sun Technovate 08 that this time was painted with Green all over. Pratima Harigunani of CyberMedia News caught up with Karthik Ramarao director technology systems engineering, Sun Microsystems India as he talks of the various facets of Green investments

Green is glamorous. But how much of the present adoption has moved from the ‘look-good' value to a more strategic posture?

It is, in fact, both the cases. Especially in the IT spectrum of India, the absolute dollar value may not be that significant but it can bring enormous marketing muscle. At the same time, there are also CIOs who are taking and reaping Green IT at the strategic level.

Can you share some lessons that you got from creating the well-appreciated Santa Clara and Bangalore data center?

It has been only a positive experience. We have seen improvements in metrics in savings, energy, performance as well as decrease in management overheads with an increase in agility.

Is Green IT still at the cusp of economics vs ecology?

More of our customers are getting aware and they are of the view that they can reap value in a fair span of time. Awareness exists but so does some reluctance because of upfront investment costs. Green IT does not come free of cost. Green investments are easier when someone is building up from scratch rather than doing it in transitioning.

With pieces like Niagra processor, chip-multi-threading technology, SPARC etc, what is your view on the ecosystem efficiency beyond the data center dimension of Green IT?

Yes, it is a pretty wide subject. There's more to it - be it chips servers or software etc. We do have stuff there but that's still few. Then you have racks, networking aspects, brick-and-mortar aspects that complete the whole picture. In India itself, about a year back, we launched an alliance for best-of-the-breed components around Green IT.

What's the next piece of action from Sun of this terrain? Our focus now is to improve the technology and we would now be automating it. What if we automate the overall data center? There is a lot of R&D going on now on automating data centers as well as on power, cooling capabilities. We are also active on open source forums, on networking technology and virtualising networking.

Any challenges that still remain? Awareness and acceptable level of knowledge is an issue to work on. Also there is a concern on investments as capital and operating expenses both matter a lot.

How's Sun's innovations in Green IT going forward?

Sun has taken an eco-initiative and right from basic fabric, design to architecture of products we are incorporating Green based on metrics like reduced power consumption, reduced cooling requirements and less space requirements. The product launches through the last two years have delivered plenty of metrics be it the Black Box or Niagra. The Bangalore data center is a proof of the pudding.