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The need to remain Greener

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CIOL Bureau
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Introduction…

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For many years, the industry and computer users demanded and got more computing power - faster CPU, faster hard drives, more memory, etc.

No attention was paid to the amount of energy consumed or environmental impact of disposal of computer gear or a company's carbon footprint.

Now with global climate change making headlines worldwide, energy conservation has become vital, and technologies such as virtualization have become critical as it eliminates the use of additional hardware and conserves power use as well.

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Most importantly, by going green, firms are seeing bottom line financial gains and at the same time branded as an environment-friendly corporate citizen.

Growing management commitment to Green IT

Majority of IT leaders in a survey on green IT report that their organizations have environmental sustainability goals for information technology and are motivated almost equally by social responsibility and business benefits.

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However, at this time only a handful see green IT as a competitive advantage. Public firms are facing pressure from consumers and investors to reduce their carbon footprint and some high profile firms have set goals to become carbon neutral over the next few years.

PG&E, the large energy utility giant, has launched several programs designed to help customers reduce their energy consumption, including a rebate for businesses that install energy efficient equipment in their data centers.

Strong government backing and stricter regulation will be catalysts

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So far IT response to the sustainable growth has been peace meal. However, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is leading the government’s Green IT initiative - one that promotes a “cradle to grave” approach to the Green IT lifecycle.

The lifecycle starts with how you design facilities and buy products; continues with management of how equipment is used; and finishes with responsible recycling and disposal techniques.

EPA launched www.greenIT.gov on Earth Day to present all of EPA’s Green IT resources in one easy-to-find location and bring together EPA programs that cover the various aspects of the environmental lifecycle.

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Websites such as greenIT.gov are a good start, but staying green over the long haul means capitalizing on heightened public awareness and implementing new technologies with a substantial investment.

A number of US state governments are considering mandating reduced energy consumption over the next few years. Most government have regulations in place on disposal of electronic equipment as well and promoting re-use.

ROI and Green IT investment

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“You can only manage what you can measure,” is one of the most common phrases in management courses. How do you measure energy efficiency as most firms will need to look at ROI on their Green IT initiatives?

McKinsey & Company and the Uptime institute have come up with a report which urged companies to adopt a new metric called Corporate Average Data Efficiency (CADE) that combines both IT and facilities costs to monitor energy use, and create "energy czar" positions to manage energy efficiency.

The report proposes a three-part solution:

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1. Companies must improve IT asset management with best practices, virtualization and by setting energy efficiency criteria for hardware procurement.

2. Companies need to keep track of total cost of

ownership of their data centers.

3. Companies need to set and execute plans to increase energy efficiency by setting measureable, achievable goals. Sometime simple obvious changes go a long way - a high profile financial services firm realized a 40 per cent reduction in paper consumption by changing all printers to print double sided by default. This did involve an investment of purchasing new printers; however, their investment was recouped within a short time by reduced consumption of paper.



SAS has developed a new software that comes with hierarchies and metrics that have been pre-defined, and loaded into a dashboard and scorecard, to make it easier for businesses to participate in the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

GRI is a 10-year-old organization that's developed a framework which can be used by businesses to measure and report their economic, environmental, and social performance.

Companies can use SAS for sustainability to analyse the cost of carbon emissions, model various scenarios.

Virtualization and Green IT

Virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012, according to Gartner.

Virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged.

Every server removed from the data center results in approximately $800 per year in power and cooling savings.

Multiple studies have confirmed that the average CPU utilization of most servers is in single digits – by implementing virtualization firms can easily double the CPU utilization reducing server footprint, maintenance and manpower costs and not to mention reduced energy usage.

The goals of saving on energy costs and other costs are very appealing to consumers who want to go “green”. Green IT and the outsourcing industry Companies, under pressure from their shareholders and consumers are asking for suppliers to follow stricter environmental standards.

The Brown-Wilson Group, an outsourcing industry consulting firm, has found that corporations are shifting their responsibility for environmental concerns to the supply chain in their "Black Book of Outsourcing: 2007 Green Outsourcer Report."

While many outsourcing vendors, including some offshore firms out of India, have proactively established green corporate policies to retain competitive appeal as a number of client firms are planning to add sustainable IT in their selection process and as goals in the contracts.

Global outsourcing firms also see a growing business opportunity as more clients will embrace the application hosting model – thus reducing the client’s data center footprint and the outsourcing firms can use virtualization technology to service multiple clients.



To conclude…

Firms can start off with small steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

Some examples are purchasing computer equipment with energy star labels, enable the power management option in computers, double server CPU utilization by implementing virtualization, turn on by default double sided printing, recycle cartridges and other electronic gear, etc.

In the long term, firms can look at data center redesign, better space utilization or “densification”, moving to “green” buildings and also working with their suppliers to reduce their carbon foot print.

Some firms purchase computer gear from suppliers where the entire packing material is 100 per cent reusable (which is the law in some European countries) and all transactions (e.g. order processing, invoicing, etc) are paperless.

Green IT has reached a point where it is not for bragging or branding any longer – firms are sincerely looking to be environment friendly and recoup any investment with savings from energy utilization, etc.

(The author is partner, Tholons)

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