Paint IT green

Once upon a time, the IT department was ignored when it came to sustainability. But now, more and more Australian companies are wising up to the benefits of green IT. Andrew Collins explains how these new technologies can cut carbon emissions, power usage and your power bill.

By implementing various green technologies and policies, IT departments can theoretically slash power consumption and resource wastage, therefore lowering effective carbon emissions and their power bills.

Let’s take a look at some of the most promising green IT solutions available.

Server virtualisation

In general computing terms, virtualisation is the abstraction of logical resources from physical resources. In plain English, server virtualisation entails taking a physical server and constructing a program to emulate it - a virtual server - that can be run on another computer. For all intents and purposes, this virtual server acts just as a physical server would.

Without virtualisation, you tend to have a physical server for each task that needed serving - one for web hosting, one for file serving, one for print serving and so on. But since virtual servers are just software, you can pack several of them onto a single physical server.

This is useful because physical servers are rarely used to their full capacity. Although your web server may occasionally rise to maximum utilisation, typical usage is much lower, so you’re paying for more computing power and electricity than you actually need. By converting these servers into virtual machines, you can consolidate them all onto just a couple of physical servers that have enough computing power to run them all concurrently, minimising resource wastage.

Server virtualisation has the nice side effect of cutting CAPEX, since you don’t need to buy as many physical servers in the first place.

According to IBRS analyst Colin Boswell, server virtualisation can be a big energy saver, but it only really suits organisations with big budgets and lots of servers, many of whom have already implemented the technology.

“The big players have mostly gone down that route - people with a million-dollar-a-year budget. If they’re spending that much on their IT, they’re almost certainly virtualising as much as they can,” he says.

Data deduplication

Like server virtualisation, data deduplication is all about maximising the usage of existing resources. Deduplication products comb through your storage devices, deleting any repeated data, so only a single instance of each piece of data remains.

Say you send an email with a 10 MB PDF attachment to your 500 coworkers or employees. That one email attachment now accounts for 5 GB of storage space on your mail server (500 x 10 MB). Deduplication could eliminate all but one instance of that 10 MB file, freeing up 4990 MB on the server.

By removing redundancy in your stored data, you essentially reduce the amount of storage space you need, therefore lowering the power you have to throw at these storage devices. And like server virtualisation, deduplication also has the side benefit of lowering how much storage you actually need to buy in the first place; so with some good planning, you can reduce your CAPEX, too.

The above email example showcases file-level deduplication, which removes duplicate files from your storage. Some other products - those based on block- or bit-level deduplication - can drill down deeper into files, removing redundancy within a file, as well as across many files. These make even more efficient use of storage, but take more processing power to run.

But despite the technology’s potential for savings, Boswell says there aren’t that many people using it right now. But soon, you won’t be able to escape deduplication.

“Many of the systems coming out now are going to have deduplication built into them,” Boswell says.

Boswell also warns that deduplication has ramifications for disaster recovery: if you only have one copy of your data and that one copy is destroyed, you’ve lost all your data. So make sure you adapt your disaster recovery plans to suit.

Cloud computing

Broadly speaking, cloud computing is the outsourcing of computation, allowing you to pay someone else for the use of their computational resources. This broad definition includes two main things: paying for a discrete service, such as web-based email or security, and renting remote infrastructure on which to run your own applications or computations.

The green benefits of the two approaches are the same: you get the use of these applications or infrastructure without having to pay for power, since that is handled by the service provider. For example, let’s say your company starts using a web-based email service. You don’t need to worry about powering any servers - that’s the service provider’s responsibility. The only power you’re responsible for is that consumed by your own desktop machines.

It’s a similar story for infrastructure based in the cloud. If you need to run a stack of calculations, you can just rent some server time from a provider, rather than buying a bunch of power-hungry servers. You’ve essentially outsourced the ‘green-worry’ to the infrastructure provider - and they’re experts at energy savings.

Boswell explains: “The cloud vendors are saving money because they do all the very clever things with servers and cooling facilities and virtualisation and specialised systems. Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google have these enormous systems that are highly optimised for energy savings.”

Some of these cost savings are passed on to customers. And while the customers are really just transferring money from a power bill to a cloud bill, they’ll be making major savings overall, Boswell says.

Telecommuting

Telecommuting isn’t a technology as such - it’s more of a concept, supported by several related technologies. The goal of telecommuting is to allow workers to be as productive at a remote location as if they were physically in the office.

To this end, organisations often employ a combination of technologies. Teleconferencing, for one, allows remote workers to speak with one or more coworkers at once, as though they were in a private conference room, and may involve the user of voice over IP - making calls through the internet. Instant messaging accomplishes a similar goal - allowing easier and quicker communication but using text instead of voice.

More elaborate set-ups may include videoconferencing, which is more or less the same thing but with an added video component, useful when the ‘face-to-face’ element is necessary. Virtual private networks, which allow remote workers to securely access your company’s local network and files, are also popular.

There are several green benefits to be had from such an arrangement. Since employees don’t have to physically travel to the office, they keep their gas-guzzlers off the road, cutting carbon emissions significantly. However, this only really makes a difference to the company if it shoulders the burden of transport costs - like if the employees in question have company cars.

Telecommuting can also cut power usage at the office: for every employee that works from home, you need one less computer and one less telephone. And for every room of employees that telecommute, you need 10 fewer light globes, two fewer printers, one less ethernet switch and one less air conditioner. This can translate into massive cost savings.

So transport aside, telecommuting only helps your power bill - not the planet. Employees just shoulder the burden of paying for power themselves and, according to Boswell, many don’t realise it.

Referring to the common home desktop PC, Boswell says: “They don’t realise that they’ve got a 500-watt heater sitting on their desk chewing away through the power.”

Power management

The easiest green IT initiative to implement is probably the power saving features on desktop machines and portable devices. Practically every major operating system nowadays ships with a bunch of power saving features.

These features typically involve disabling power-hungry components of your desktop when they’re not needed, usually after some period of inactivity. Common options include turning off the display, spinning down hard disks and powering down any Wi-Fi connectivity. When the disabled component is needed again, it will automatically reactivate itself.

“It’s one of those so-called ‘low-hanging fruit’,” Boswell says. “If you can put that in place in an organisation, you are getting some real benefits.”

So if you’re looking for a quick fix to save a bit of power, enabling power management on your desktops is an easy first step. Again, it will only accomplish a small change if done on one machine, but these small savings add up if done across all your machines.