Greening the IT industry

Everywhere you turn lately there are plans for IT companies to become more sustainable. At the recent launch of IBM's Project Big Green, the company announced that it was planning on spending over $1 billion every year to "escalate the development of green products and services", and at the Cisco Networkers annual conference this week in Brisbane, 68% of delegates opted for the memory stick instead of paper-based conference proceedings, which reduced paper costs associated with the conference by 30%.

In a recent research study, undertaken by ACA Research on behalf of IBM, which looked at the practices and attitudes of large Australian enterprises towards Green IT, it was found that nearly two-thirds (61%) of businesses have an environmental policy or strategy in place covering IT infrastructure; with little more than a third of respondents (36%) believing that the reduction of carbon emissions from their IT infrastructure is a high priority for their businesses.

The ACA Research study survey questioned IT managers and directors from 104 large Australian enterprises, and found that only 35% of respondents agreed they are aware of current energy usage, which suggests that Australian enterprises are currently unable to track and manage the environmental impact of information technology effectively.

According to the research, those businesses with an environmental policy incorporating IT are more focused on mandating methods of disposal for old IT equipment (40%), rather than reducing energy consumption (32%), although 51% of businesses have mandated a progressive reduction of the overall impact of IT on the environment. However, with under half of businesses (46%) monitoring energy efficiency, most will be unable to measure progress meaningfully.

According to Suzanne Kerwan, executive sponsor for the environment, IBM Australia and New Zealand, IBM believes it should become more sustainable for many reasons.

"Sustainability is not new for IBM; it has always focused on being a responsible corporate citizen," she said, adding that IBM has had an environmental policy in place since 1971.

"IBM was the first organisation to publicly commit to a reduction in PFC greenhouse gas emissions in its chip manufacturing processes, which was reduced by 58%. From 1990 to 2005, IBM also reduced its CO₂ emissions by 40% across the globe, and has committed to a further 12% reduction over the next five years."

Aidan Tudehope, managing director at Macquarie Telecom, says that his firm is taking a practical rather than theoretical approach to moving towards an eco-friendly, energy-efficient data centre.

"There are a number of IT equipment vendors in the market taking steps toward improving the energy efficiency of their products, which is terrific to see. Just focusing on selecting green equipment though won't necessarily solve the problem," he said.

"The difference is made when these products are cleverly implemented, managed and effectively used. It's about how you run these technologies in your business environment."

"It's evident that the IT industry and customers in general are on a journey toward carbon neutrality or greater energy efficiency. We are of the opinion that IT has a role to play not only in selling 'green' products and solutions to customers, but also in guiding customers in their usage and smart implementation of these solutions," he said.

Tudehope points out that there is a lot of vendor hype around 'green' in the market at the moment and says that Macquarie Telecom is taking practical steps to identify which technologies are actually making an impact in terms of improving energy efficiency or driving down energy consumption.

But sustainability is not as simple as implementing 'green' products. The IT sector is also one of the largest consumers of energy and data centre power and cooling issues have become the focus for many of the IT industries objectives.

David Blumanis, data centre advisor, American Power Conversion (APC) says that the local market can expect major issues with legacy data centre equipment due to increasing technology changes and the impact it will have on power and cooling.

"The TCO model for data centres is changing and there will be an increasing number of outages as a result. Organisations are now looking at moving data centres to co-location facilities and removing the risk associated with maintaining sufficient power and cooling."

"For the first time ever, organisations are being significantly impacted on by power and cooling requirements. Now everyone, including IBM and HP, is developing cooling and power solutions," he says.

Blumanis sees this as posing a problem as co-location businesses have changed their billing systems so that power usage is billed separately as well as the floor space occupied. Blumanis has found that customers only want to pay for space for 3-5 years and don't want to lock themselves in for longer periods.

"Many vendors looking to enter the co-location market are forced to make a 10-year investment to set up," he says.

"CIOs are focused on how to mitigate this dynamic and how it will impact on their organisation. They are faced with the decision of either upgrading the organisation's data centre or outsourcing it to a co-location, yet this has not been an area of core competency for them in the past."

For companies like IBM, Project Big Green is a three-year strategic plan to internally double IBM's IT capacity without using any [additional] energy or increasing its carbon footprint.

Kerwan believes that it will also bring that experience and knowledge to the marketplace to help clients achieve their own sustainability goals.

"IBM will drive success by setting aggressive targets in short timeframes, such as consolidating 3900 servers to 30 mainframes to consume 80% less energy, and execute against those targets and reset these goals again for even greater sustainability benefits."