Green IT

All business energy use is now under scrutiny as the world moves towards greener, leaner living. The energy consumed by IT is fast becoming a real focus in the business community, representing an ethical issue for your key business decision makers and presenting a genuine opportunity to drive new IT business.

The data centre in particular has been identified as the chief culprit in IT CO2 emissions, with an alarming set of statistics now surfacing about the energy consumed by large server and storage racks. Similarly, everyday IT devices such as networked printers, desktops and monitors provide significant scope for IT end-user organisations to improve their green technology approach.

Of course a move towards simpler, leaner computing that makes better use of resources is not new. Cost and time pressures have been prodding IT strategy for some time now. With initiatives around consolidation, virtualisation and utilisation rates all paying into these business drivers and providing real scope to build new IT infrastructures that deliver adaptable, lowest-cost and ethically acceptable IT environments.

Business Issue

The political/ethical debate
There is a strong political and cultural momentum in the UK around climate change, impacting business just as much as in the home. Government is spearheading the challenge to businesses through the efforts of DEFRA and new bodies such as The Carbon Trust, specifically set up to help business leaders explore the green issue.

For any business there is a potential cost attached to not being seen to respond to the green issue and significant opportunity to be derived from managing the green issue proactively.

Relationships with stakeholders
Employees, customers and the local community are now all observing the business closely to see how it is responding to emerging corporate responsibility for managing carbon emissions.

Businesses are facing increasing pressure from their customers, special interest groups and all forms of government to operate in an environmentally friendly manner. There is also increasing pressure to offer transparency around the impact of their operations, publicising the businesses green activities and achievements.

Building the IT infrastructure of tomorrow
Many of the issues raised by green IT overlap with the key industry initiatives prevailing in recent years. Consolidation, virtualisation and data management are some of the IT solutions already at the top of the agenda for IT decision makers which tie in closely to the outputs required by a green IT strategy.

Reducing server sprawl, sharing workloads and building leaner, more flexible infrastructures offer cost savings, improved availability and the positive impact on energy consumption required by en effective environmental strategy.

Cost
Consuming up to 25 kilowatts of power per hour in server heat output and the same amount again in power required for cooling systems, the modern data centre is an insatiable power consumer. Even a small 30,000 sq foot data entre pumps the equivalent of 44,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

Add to this the power requirement and heat output of myriad smaller devices across the office and rapidly rising power prices and it soon becomes clear that addressing the energy needs of IT in the business provides rich scope for savings. Gartner estimates that a typical business spends 5% of its IT budget on energy today, a figure currently set to triple to 15% within five years. The imperative to explore energy savings now is strong.

Aims

An effective strategy for green IT
The key to success in almost any endeavour is great planning and green IT is no exception. End-user organisations with significant IT estates must now be formulating a plan for reducing the environmental impact of IT (and other) operations, either driven by their social conscience, pressure from stakeholders or the motivation of very significant energy savings.

By documenting and publishing an environmental strategy, the organisation is able to make measurable commitments to change and communicate its green objectives clearly to employees, investors and suppliers.

A holistic approach
Blade technology is at the forefront of greener, leaner technology but it’s just one element in a whole range of hardware, software and infrastructure solutions being developed by vendors to help customers minimise energy needs whilst maintaining or improving performance.

Customers now have options spanning the whole IT infrastructure, including systems management solutions, power and cooling management solutions, groundbreaking server design and architecture, data centre services and energy efficient systems initiatives.

Pro-activity around the green issue
The increasing importance of the environmental debate will make green technology a key ongoing topic in business. It’s important that end-user organisations build innovation into their environmental strategy, tasking IT administrators with scoping emerging technologies with a view to implementation.

Awareness of the green technology debate will help to create an environmentally friendly culture in the business, one where users more readily accept change and confidently make their own suggestions around energy saving changes to the IT infrastructure. A forum for communicating and discussing how the organisational IT impacts the environment will provide the catalyst for future ideas.

Why Avnet

It’s getting harder to manage a data centre efficiently with rising utility bills and ever-increasing demands due to processor power and server density increases. Growing user requests mean heavier strain on servers and air conditioning units in the data centre. For many companies, this puts data centre costs and performance under the spotlight – making them essential factors for a successful adaptive enterprise.

Our vendor technologies can help alleviate data centre challenges.

Save money – energy and cooling costs can be reduced without sacrificing performance
Increase capacity – more equipment can be added to an existing data centre, avoiding or postponing the need to build a new data centre
Improve reliability – future failures can be mitigated by reducing overheating risks

Our vendors offer new breakthrough services that anticipate how data centre power and cooling needs will continue to grow and change for enterprises worldwide.

Consolidation
One of the most effective ways to lower energy consumption is to consolidate servers, especially little-used servers. By moving these applications onto a single platform, IT sites save almost the entire energy costs of the original server, the cooling costs of that server and gain greater manageability by having applications running on fewer physical machines.

Business issues addressable via consolidation include:

Controlling IT costs of ownership
Delivering IT as a service
Building flexibility into IT estates

Virtualisation
Virtualisation consolidates existing and expected future workloads. This reduces the number of physical servers required, thereby reducing floor space, cooling and capital costs. It also increases the utilisation of servers to improve energy efficiency.

Business issues addressable via virtualisation include:

IT cost of ownership
Reducing risk
Improving service levels
Building flexibility into IT infrastructures

Greener Technology
There have been many advances in power and cooling technology, as vendors continue to address power efficiency issues across the data centre by introducing new technology solutions to meet the needs of its customers, particularly those building next-generation data centres.

Customers today benefit from advances in:

Green storage technology that can cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres by 50 percent
Blade technology that significantly reduces power consumption when compared to standard servers
Energy management systems which are designed to deliver savings in cooling energy costs

W.E.E.E. Directive Guidance
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (W.E.E.E.) Directive deals with the increasing impact of waste devices on the environment and will impact almost all UK businesses. Avnet has registered as a producer under W.E.E.E. regulations and can help you to work with customers to manage this increasingly important business issue.

Free Energy Survey
The Carbon Trust, a government sponsored organisation, works with businesses who spend over £50,000 per annum on power to help them manage energy use more efficiently. Their expert consultants identify energy saving opportunities and offer practical advice on how to achieve these. Look at www.carbontrust.co.uk/energy/assessyourorganisation/energy_survey.htm to see if you or your end-users qualify.

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