The green agenda – Achieving carbon peace of mind

The introduction of the Carbon Reduction Commitment has put ‘green’ back on the agenda. But Chris Gabriel, director of marketing and solutions at Logicalis says a low-carbon outlook can also bring efficiency and financial benefits.

As of April this year, the prospect of real financial penalties stemming from the introduction of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (recently renamed the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme) means the board will be paying closer attention to IT’s power consumption than ever before, placing carbon reduction strategies at the forefront of all IT manager’s minds.

While the initial phase of CRC is only compulsory for large ‘low energy-intensive’ private and public organisations, the cost and resource efficiency benefits of going green reveal a compelling case for change as we move toward economic recovery; green is firmly back on the agenda for businesses of all sizes as we enter this new decade.

However, with so much green-wash out there, it can be difficult knowing where to start. IT assets with a green-label can often come with a hefty price tag in tow, so it is important to thoroughly assess the real-life business efficiency benefits of every potential green IT purchase.

Contrary to popular belief, though, it doesn’t always cost the earth to be green. Organisations can take small but effective steps towards achieving a carbon efficient IT strategy. The key is to start at the very beginning, understanding what you’ve got and taking a pragmatic approach that aligns with business need. The following three step plan will help kick-start your green agenda, taking the IT department and the business that bit closer to achieving carbon-piece-of-mind:

This is where the leg work begins. To lay the foundations of any green IT strategy, organisations need to first identify their existing carbon demands; taking a 50,000 ft view and knowing exactly what you’ve got and how you use it is paramount. Thorough auditing and measurement will help you to understand and prioritise what changes need to be made to take you on the road to achieving carbon reduction goals.

Bringing on-board a specialist IT partner or consultant can help accelerate and ease the challenges of this procedure. Furthermore, a third party will bring with it objectivity – as highlighted before, on the surface it may seem easy to dive feet first into a full-on ‘green-label’ approach, but it is not always the best option for achieving long term goals.

Today, savvy organisations are embarking on Thermal Assessment Services that provide a detailed audit of carbon outputs as the first step in planning a carbon-efficient IT strategy.

This will make clear where you are, and where you need to be. By helping to identify practical ways to overcome the capacity and energy limitations, operational vulnerabilities, and technology constraints that exist in IT infrastructures and data centres, you will be able to make informed and intelligent decisions about the strategy you hope to pursue.

Once you have a clear view of your current carbon landscape, you can then explore innovative ways to increase efficiencies. Small changes can make big differences. We call it Tweak-onomics; you may call it intelligent IT investment.

A big-bang approach can be limited in terms of releasing capital investment and safeguarding business continuity, so it is advisable to prioritise change with small proven steps that will maximise return on efficiency at every turn.

Tweak-onomics provides a series of tips that require minimum investment but result in maximum output, helping drive down costs and enhance performance all the while reducing carbon consumption and increasing IT efficiency. Examples include:

• Data de-duplication. Corporate IT systems are awash with data that is inaccurate, incomplete, out-of-date, duplicated, redundant or just plain meaningless. This dirty data is the type that can, over time, turn a lean organisation into one that is slow to respond to market demand. Most underestimate the extent of the problem, and are unaware of the amount of efficiency savings – carbon, resource and cost – can be gleaned by cleaning it up.

Getting rid of all that unnecessary data enables organisations to increase backup storage efficiency by up to 5000 percent. In turn, this frees up critical data centre space and dramatically reduces power consumption, keeping cooling costs down and carbon footprints to a minimum.

• Lower power states. Thirty percent of power is wasted by organisations each year as a result of inactive PCs. Energy savings can be maximised by placing machines into lower power states without interfering with end-user productivity. PC Power Management tools can reduce power use by up to 97 percent or £35 per desktop.

• IT process automation. Automating IT processes across the board can provide significant efficiencies in carbon output, resource and operating costs, as well as improving service delivery if you identify where automation can change an operating model; eg move to 24/7 data centre ‘lights out’ model, where systems not in use at any one time can power down accordingly; and share common infrastructures and move workloads automatically based on organisational requirements.

There is no quick fix to being and staying green, it is an ongoing process of identifying where further efficiencies can be made. Monitoring technology usage in order to maintain green strategies and seek out further efficiencies is vital.

Many organisations are actively taking steps to become more efficient, and thereby reduce their energy bill and carbon footprint, but few are able to truly provide demonstrable evidence of the impact these policies have. Today, advanced enterprise software is available to address this problem, providing solutions that increase profitability, aid sustainability and visibly communicate and support cultural change within the workplace.

Investing in interactive reporting tools that enable you to have a complete and ongoing view of carbon outputs and energy usage, helps identify where further efficiencies need to be made, makes your carbon efficiency strategy and its success visible to the board and demonstrates IT’s supporting role in becoming green.

Examples of how a holistic approach to carbon management, monitoring and reporting can be seen in Verdium’s environmental dashboard and Computer Associates’ (CA) Eco-Software. For example, CA’s new business-focused dashboard enables the entire business to monitor its environmental footprint, from the carbon footprint in a retailer’s store, through to the energy use in its data centre. When fed with information from active carbon management systems now available from Cisco or HP, the business can measure and prove its sustainability programmes. For the IT department, having the ability to promote CO₂ and energy savings across the organisation is a powerful tool in promoting the wider environmental agenda.

While taking this pragmatic step-by-step approach into account, IT managers and CIOs will understand that there is always further justification to ‘go green’ than just saving the planet; every action toward increasing efficiency, whether labelled ‘green’ or not is good for the bottom line. With the economy still affecting business in all sectors, finding areas of efficiency savings and innovation will be crucial in maintaining business growth. Looking forward, as you feel the pressure to go green, think of this as the time to show IT as an enabler and asset to the business rather than just an incremental cost.

www.uk.logicalis.com

Top tips for green and efficient IT

Process (server) virtualisation

Typically operating at between five and 20 percent, under-utilised servers are clogging up data centres and wasting floor space, power, and cooling capacity. The mantra is simple, consolidate if you can.

Storage virtualisation and consolidation

Growing at some 45 percent year on year, the need for storage seems unstoppable. It’s not; consolidating and virtualising storage into shared resource pools can drive up utilisation and reduce this growth.

Information life cycle management (ILM)

85 percent of corporate data is unstructured information and 30-40 percent of it is duplicated data. ILM allows organisations to create a tiered storage strategy, classifying and moving data to the right level of storage, saving space as well as money.

Application consolidation

Many applications are very rarely used or their functionality has been superseded by a new application. Operate a streamlined application strategy by documenting an application footprint and rationalise accordingly.

Desktop power management and thin client

The average thin client device draws about one-tenth the power of the desktop PC; so major energy and cooling savings are achievable. Similarly, PC power management can reduce power use by up to 97 percent, saving up to £35 per desktop.

Branch / remote office consolidation

Collapsing remote services into a well-managed environmentally efficient central processing and storage environment can have considerable benefits where large numbers of remote file and print services exist, as well as the side benefit of improved information lifecycle management and regulation of that remote data.

Unified communication and video conferencing

UC and video collaboration can take people off roads, planes, and enable truly flexible home working strategies, drastically curtailing an individual’s carbon footprint.

Appliance consolidation

Data centres now support a range of appliances and many are surprised to find out how many firewalls they operate, or how many load balancers they have. Both legacy servers and new appliances have potential for consolidation which can deliver significant service improvement opportunities.

Intelligent buildings

By using biometric systems, intelligent communications and server technologies, shared service buildings will allow one intelligent building to play the role of two, or more.

Digital forms

By replacing the initial paper exchange, data is digitised at the source, emailed, stored and moved around an organisation much faster and efficiently and paper consumption is reduced. Turning out print queues to double-sided printing can also reduce paper use in an average office by 40 percent.