Green IT matters

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: It is widely understood that the way in which we are behaving as a society is environmentally unsustainable, causing irreparable damage to our planet. It is becoming progressively more important for all businesses to act (and to be seen to act) in an environmentally responsible manner, both to fulfill their legal and moral obligations as well as to enhance the brand and improve corporate image.

Companies are competing in a green market and must avoid the real and growing financial penalties that are increasingly being levied against carbon production. So what does this mean for the IT industry? Information and communication technology accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Many IT companies have already reacted to rising power costs and concerns over climate change by creating more energy-efficient products and ramping up their marketing around environmental concerns. The main issues cited have been the amount of electricity used by processors and hardware—especially in datacentres. The intense power requirements needed to run and cool datacentres now account for almost a quarter of the global carbon dioxide emissions from ICT.

A typical 10,000 sq ft datacentre consumes more electricity than 8,000 60-watt light bulbs. That represents six to 10 times the power needed to operate a typical office building at peak demand. Given that most datacentres run 24x7x365, the companies that own them could end up paying millions just to keep their computers turned on. Forrester Research estimates that datacentres require 0.5 to 1 watt of cooling power for each watt of server power used and that a typical x86 server consumes between 30% and 40% of its maximum power when idle.

Legacy systems often require a large IT department to run them which, in itself, involves additional heating and lighting costs, as well as the environmental impact of running a large office.

Hence, environmental responsibility is emerging as an important topic for corporate IT organisations and their technology suppliers. Corporate IT will go green in the coming years, driven by a combination of cost efficiency, regulatory compliance and corporate responsibility motivations.

It is widely assumed that a typical computer consumes about 0.65 kWh in use, 0.35kWh in stand-by and 0.03kWh in hibernate mode. This translates to 2145 kW of electricity per annum. As 1kWh produces 0.51kg of CO2, a single PC in office costs an insignificant amo-unt to run, but generates 1,094 tonne of CO2 per annum, equivalent to the CO2 produced by a single passenger flying from London to Cairo. Spread this acr-oss a distributed desktop environment of 2,000 PCs and you have an annual carbon footprint of 2,188 tonne of CO2.

The bright side is that there are so many inefficiencies in IT that these are low-hanging fruits to bring down CO2 emissions.

Several methods are available for minimising the environmental impact of a computing system.

Power generation: One of the goals of green computing is to use power generated from sources that are more environmentally friendly than coal-fired power stations.

Virtualisation: Computer virtualisation is the process of running two or more logical computer systems on one set of physical hardware. With virtualisation, a system administrator could combine several physical systems into virtual machines on one single, powerful system, thereby unplugging the original hardware and reducing power and cooling consumption.

Power management: An open industry standard called advanced configuration and power interface provides a standard programming interface that allows an OS to directly control the power saving aspects of the hardware. This allows the system to automatically turn off components such as monitors and hard drives after set periods of inactivity. In addition, a system may hibernate, in which it turns off nearly all components, including the CPU and the system RAM, greatly reducing the system’s electricity usage.

* Centralising and consolidating storage capacity on storage networks.

* Outsourcing the datacentre to a service provider, which can distribute computing resources to customers on an as-needed, resources-efficient basis.

* Deploying more energy-efficient servers and storage devices.

* Deploying more efficient cooling and airflow systems, and uninterruptible power supplies.

* Installing sensors and software to track and regulate coolinga nd airflow.

Carbon Credits: Carbon credits create a market for reducing greenhouse emissions by giving a monetary value to the cost of polluting the air. Emissions become an internal cost of doing business and are visible on the balance sheet alongside raw materials and other liabilities or assets.