Many say that it takes two Chinese calligraphy characters to write the word ‘crisis’ ; one for ‘danger’, the other representing ‘opportunity’. That can be interpreted as: in a crisis, be aware of the danger but recognise the opportunity within.
Or so Chris Atkins noted at IDC’s customer-focused ICT Efficiency and Sustainability Conference 2009 in London recently. As head of product and partner marketing for Sun Microsystems, Atkins finds green IT and the environment high on his agenda. IT providers should be keeping their eco-eyes open for opportunities around the newest datacentre designs, open source deployment, open standards, and reuse of technology.
“New economic problems will exacerbate your challenges but also provide an impetus for re-thinking architectures, according to IDC,” Atkins said in his presentation. “Sustainability means living within the planet’s means to support this and future generations.”
What is the future for sustainable IT? Chris Ingle, European systems consulting and research director at IDC, said that technology infrastructure investment from now until 2012 must cut costs and transform the customer business.
“Government regulation and the availability of power, and the costs of power, mean things are going to change. The overall message is that we are not out of the woods yet in terms of the economy, [and yet] businesses are looking to transform their infrastructure despite a contraction in budgets,” said Ingle.
“There is a lot more that CIOs can do with virtualisation and off-premises services. And although it is early days, that is probably going to make IT more efficient.”
Those trends were putting more power in the hands of business units outside
IT. Meanwhile, increased client management needs added to the challenges.
Across Europe, including the UK, governments have earmarked technology as a
primary way to achieve pressing sustainability targets.
Closer to home, the Welsh Assembly has made a commitment to sustainable development, creating an overarching Wales Spatial Plan aimed at building sustainable communities, a sustainable economy, and valuing the environment while respecting distinctiveness and accessibility.
Tech providers can help by educating businesses on how they can save money and carbon at the same time. Atkins said that datacentres will be a key way to achieve these savings yet at the same time, rack and power density in the server room is increasing.
“Sun European datacentres have achieved 50 per cent utility reduction and 80 per cent space compression,” he claimed.
Processor innovation
Processor-level tech innovation would help boost server utilisation and
computing efficiencies generally, including the areas of peak and idle power
usage reduction. Application performance needs tackling too and traditional
remedies were expensive and inefficient.
“Today’s multi-core, multi-socket application server designs are increasingly held back by slow storage,” said Atkins. “When requesting data, the server spends most of its time waiting for storage.”
Solid State Disk (SSD) storage would be part of the answer, Atkins suggested.
UK property website Rightmove.co.uk has transformed its datacentres.
Luke West, head of service delivery at
Rightmove.co.uk,
says its site hosts about
one million current properties and 18 million historical records. About 600
million pages are served a month, with peak traffic hitting 400Mbps.
Each of its three datacentres must be able to handle 50 per cent of its total load, although they usually handle 33 per cent. Two Content Delivery Networks are used to further reduce site loadings, as most page weight is images.
“The traditional model is to use a live and a stand-by site,” said West. “You buy two lots of everything at each site, and you must have capacity in your systems for the load. Half your investment sits idle at the stand-by site. Half your investment in the firewall, load balancer and switch hardware may be idle at the live site.”
In comparison, Rightmove.co.uk’s set-up mitigates risk for greater efficiency and less cost in power and energy.
Managing printing also crucial
As Ingle said, IDC’s research suggests that cost control is going to remain a
major factor for most if not all businesses. Also they must be sustainable both
financially and environmentally.
Bob Roth, vice president of strategic technology sourcing at Viacom, presented a snapshot of his company’s transition to managed print services. Viacom’s corporate copier contract was due to expire; at the same time, the company wanted to streamline its printing and copying environment, cut the overall cost of its operating output devices such as printers and print and copy in a greener way.
Viacom’s core team attended HP’s Print 2.0 workshop to learn about industry trends, efficient output management and MPS.
MPS can help organisations manage, consolidate, control and optimise their print infrastructure, with the solution incorporating technology, supplies, support and maintenance.
Roth said that management of Viacom’s print, copy, fax and scanning services had been unintegrated. All devices are now centrally coordinated, with increased functionality and 80 per cent of personal printers removed.
“We have gone from 2,500 mostly personal output devices to just 1,000 networked printers and multi-function devices, and from 100 models of device down to just 15.”
Emission reductions
Viacom claims to have used just 70 per cent of its former bill in energy and
reduced its paper use 45.9 per cent in a year. This has saved both carbon and
cash.
“There was a 62.7 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from power fleet and reduced paper use,” said Roth.
“Overall we reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 550 metric tonnes from kW/h energy and paper reductions over a one-year period, after fleet optimisation and HP MPS that is equivalent to annual greenhouse gas emissions from 101 passenger vehicles, using the US Environmental Protection Agency’s calculator.”
Ingle added: “Resellers must continue to prepare customers and organisations for uncertain times. The second opportunity is to pick up the focus on improvements in the IT that is heavily energy dependent.”
A meeting of minds in a lean, green world
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