Powering down
1 Jul 08
The scale of computer use by all types of business means that there are serious savings to be made by sensible strategies. Anthony Harrington looks at some approaches to reducing the IT department's power use
by Anthony Harrington
All computers, peripherals and computer networks use power, and power consumption is a fundamental part of any organisation’s carbon footprint. It follows that any company looking to cut its carbon emissions has to pay attention to IT.
At the same time, IT can be a powerful tool for managing and reducing power consumption.
IBM claims to have made one of the most extensive and thorough studies so far into the management of workplace IT systems. The aim was to explore how organisations can reduce their carbon footprint in a sustainable fashion, while cutting costs. The study was carried out by IBM’s UK and Ireland Technical Consultancy Group, with assistance from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which made its sites available for the IBM study.
The starting point for the IBM team was the realisation that ecological responsibility and business responsibility have a lot in common. Both reject waste and profligacy and both embrace responsible stewardship. IBM’s focus, not surprisingly was on the consumption of electricity and the carbon footprint of the distributed IT systems and services environment. The study looked at all kinds of kit, including traditional IT equipment such as mainframes and PCs, photocopiers and fax machines and even power packs for mobile devices.
“Many of these devices use more energy than people expect, and use it in unexpected ways – it is not just how long they are switched on for, but also the way in which they are used,” the IBM report says. Establishing just how energy hungry these devices are, and how this can be reduced without affecting performance is a good starting point. IBM reckons that by “wising up” to energy waste it has saved more than $100m (£52m) in energy costs over the past 10 years. Since all such savings go directly to the bottom line, that means a substantial increase in profit
According to the consultancy Gartner, combined carbon emissions from PCs, servers, system cooling plants, local area networks, telephones and mobiles equates to 2 per cent of the world’s total.
IBM’s study developed a “green transformational programme”, a generalised methodology for greening up IT.
This begins with a strategy workshop by the programme “sponsors” in the organisation, looking for the areas of maximum “payback”. Armed with this “component map” the second step involves prioritising the areas agreed and analysing their impact on the organisation and the scope they offer for carbon savings.
“The aim is to produce savings in energy consumption and spend that are clear, identifiable and measurable,” the study says.
Organisations need to think in a joined-up way, complementing power saving studies with efforts to reduce waste and travel and increase recycling.
IBM, of course, is not hoeing a lonely row in trying to green up IT. Virtually every serious player in the industry is giving this serious consideration.
Microsoft Scotland regional manager Raymond O’Hare points out that Microsoft’s analysis of the way we work shows that 45 minutes of the typical “nine to five” working day are wasted and offers significant opportunity for the introduction of more efficient working practices using IT. Remote working technology is an obvious step, as is the inexpensive video conferencing technology Microsoft has recently introduced.
Microsoft’s analysis of the way the “energy pie” breaks down is as follows: printers 6 per cent, networks 7 per cent, telephony 24 per cent, servers 23 per cent and PCs take the remaining 40 per cent.
If we take a typical organisation with a high dependency on IT, and 1,000 employees, that equates to 473 tonnes of CO2. Add in 100 servers in a cooled environment and that equates to the same again. Taken as a whole, that organisation’s IT carbon footprint will be similar to the output from 1,200 UK cars.
O’Hare points out that Windows Vista does a great deal more than any preceding operating system to make PCs more energy efficient. The “sleep” option on Vista is as energy efficient as switching the machine off, but is more productive since instead of having to wait for the PC to reboot, emerging from sleep mode takes just two seconds.
Smart operating systems like Vista, O’Hare points out, can use the facility in modern hardware to step down the power requirements for non-demanding tasks. This dynamic processor power management has the potential to save significant amounts of energy. It also makes the power setting specific to the machine and to the task.
Other savings include a default time-out that automatically blanks the display. Microsoft’s studies show a potential saving of over $70 (£36) per PC using automatic sleep mode, so a 1,000-user organisation would be able to reduce its energy bill by $70,770. Leaving 10 PCs on when not in use, not putting them in sleep mode equates to the greenhouse gas output of one additional car on the road.
A number of websites now offer “green calculators” which aim, in various ways, to help companies calculate their carbon footprint and to run some “what-if” scenarios looking at potential savings.
Alan Quinn, managing director of Castle Computer Services, points out that his company’s green calculator, which went live in June, is rather different. It takes one of Castle’s top selling concepts, the “virtual server”, and helps companies to see just what the green outcome would be if they adopted this technology.
“One of the problems companies face is that servers seem to breed like rabbits,” Quinn says. A smallish company might start off by thinking that five servers, each running a single application, are all that it will need. But more applications come along and each gets its own server, and before you know where you are, even a modest sized company can be running 20 or more servers. In larger organisations the problem is even more acute.
“The problem is that it is very hard to break the rule of having a server for each application, since you do not want applications to interfere with each other or slow each other down. Yet industry studies show that 90 per cent of business servers run at 7 per cent of capacity or less.
“This situation is just going to get more extreme as the servers get more powerful,” he says. “We already have quad core processors in servers, 16 and 32 core servers are just round the corner. As they get still more powerful, the capacity utilisation drops still further, yet corporate servers are traditionally never switched off.”
Working from tables produced by DEFRA, Castle has enabled its green calculator to show what the cash and carbon savings are by “virtualising” the physical servers. “We can do a 10-for-one ratio, with one physical server acting as 10 virtual servers. What our calculator shows is that if you take a more modest approach and consolidate 20 servers down to four physical servers (running at a ratio of five virtual servers on one physical server), you will enjoy power savings worth £28,000 a year and the total savings cost in terms of maintenance and depreciation together with power savings amounts to £103,000 a year,” he says. This is the equivalent, according to the tables published by DEFRA, of taking 144 cars off the UK’s roads.
Similarly, by going to “thin client” desktops instead of using PCs, companies can make very significant savings while lowering their carbon footprint. “A PC operates at 70 watts, while a thin client virtualised desktop runs at 6 watts. So if you take an organisation with 1,000 PCs, that equates to a very significant cut in the company’s power consumption,” Quinn says.
John Beech, managing director of accounting software specialists Access Accounting says that his company introduced its green calculator as part of its drive to help all businesses become more efficient. “We worked very closely with DEFRA and The Carbon Trust to establish our figures as accurately as possible,” he says. The Access green calculator works by giving users the ability to enter units of any commodity that is purchased which has a carbon content, as they update the accounting records. The system uses the DEFRA tables to calculate the carbon impact of that purchase. “They report on their financial numbers as a matter of course, and this addition to our system enables them to track and get a carbon number on their purchases and consumables,” he says.
Jairo Rojas, director general at BASDA, which represents the UK-based business software industry, points out that BASDA recently held the inaugural meeting of its green special interest group. The aim, as the keynote speech from the European Commission’s John Doyle set out, was to move the green IT debate from a focus on hardware efficiencies to the role that business software can play. Rojas argues that it has always been difficult for businesses to measure their impact on the environment, and that business software probably has an important role to play here.
“It will be increasingly important for businesses to be able to prove their green credentials and social responsibility as regulations emerge, consumers become more discerning about suppliers and investors more sensitive to their reputations.
“BASDA is engaging with the EC and government to highlight the importance of business software in terms of energy consumption. Business software appears to measure, report and budget beyond financials into a parallel world of carbon accounting,” he says.
It is a good point, but it looks as if green calculators such as those from Castle and Access might get there before any concerted group effort by the industry as a whole.
ANTHONY HARRINGTON is a freelance business journalist..