IT is no exception to the movement, and it's not surprising. According to a 2007 study by Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a consulting professor at Stanford University, the powering and cooling of servers and auxiliary infrastructure accounted for 1.2 percent of energy consumption in the U.S. during 2005 and cost U.S. businesses $2.7 billion.
Consumption Nation
Koomey's study also highlights the possibility that servers will demand even more electricity in coming years. "If power per server remains constant, those trends would imply an increase in electricity used by servers worldwide of about 40 percent by 2010. If in addition the average power use per unit goes up at the same rate for each class, as our analysis indicates that it did from 2000 to 2005, total electricity used by servers by 2010 would be 76 percent higher than it was in 2005," notes Koomey.
Such an exponential increase in demand and consumption would have serious consequences. In April 2007, Gartner estimated that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector was responsible for approximately 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and, should Koomey's estimates prove correct, that percentage will increase substantially.
Furthermore, to meet the increased demand, utility companies need to construct additional power plants - something which would itself require additional power and could result in the loss of nondeveloped green sites. The same holds true in relation to data centers; as they hit their limit of existing capacity, new data centers will need to be constructed, potentially resulting in the loss of yet more green spaces.
Regulations and Incentives
Environmental concerns are not the only thing pushing businesses toward greening their IT operations. Governments are implementing an increasing number of policies to promote and enforce sustainable IT. The European Union (EU) is already working to establish a code of conduct for data centers, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering similar measures.
Additionally, simple economics play a major role in moving green IT into the enterprise mainstream because greening can lead to substantial savings. Obviously, reducing the amount of energy used will also reduce the amount of the electricity bill. Beyond that, businesses can reap savings on hardware and IT administration and management costs. Further increasing the appeal of green are the incentives being offered by utility companies like Pacific Gas and Electric, which reward customers that implement energy-efficient technologies such as virtualization. It may seem somewhat odd for a company to reward customers for using less of their product, but Pacific Gas and Electric does so in order to avoid the expense of new power plants and to ensure that environmental quality is maintained in the communities they serve.
Also, many consumers now expect businesses to demonstrate their green credentials and will factor this into purchasing decisions. Similarly, in order to demonstrate their own commitment to environmentally friendly practices, businesses expect their suppliers to become ecologically responsible. HP has already started this ball rolling with the latest disclosure of the emissions of its largest suppliers. Gartner recently predicted that "by 2011, suppliers to large global enterprises will need to prove their green credentials via an audited process to retain preferred supplier status."
Given these trends, it is clear that businesses may soon find that greening is no longer optional, but a cost of doing business. Green really has become the new mean.
Business Drivers
At least a couple of obstacles to greening remain. The first is simply a lack of motivation. As Mark Bramfitt, the principal program lead on Pacific Gas and Electric's Customer Energy Efficiency Team, points out, "The cost savings driver is not as strong as it could be because there is still the disconnect between the people making technology decisions and the responsibility for paying the utility bills." The solution to this problem is not complex; it simply needs senior management to be brought on board and take the lead.
A second problem is that businesses often view greening as an entirely technological matter. "We think of the problem of reducing electricity used by information technology equipment as a technical problem, but it's as much a problem of people and institutions ... To attack this problem at its root, we need to modify institutional structures and individual incentives so that the most environmentally sound outcome is also the most profitable one," notes Koomey.
And he is absolutely correct. The rewards from going green are not always as great as they could be. In part, that is because incentive schemes, such as those offered by Pacific Gas and Electric, have only recently come to market and because energy-efficient technologies have been expensive to acquire and to implement. It is also true partly because many businesses simply do not make the most out of green technologies and so do not obtain the maximum ROI.
Virtualization
Virtualization used to be a somewhat esoteric technology deployed mainly in large-scale data center server consolidation projects. However, with VMware and other virtualization vendors releasing products specifically geared for the small and midsized business market (and priced accordingly), virtualization is now within the reach of all.
Virtualization is a technology that enables multiple heterogeneous operating systems to run simultaneously on the same physical hardware. This is advantageous because running a single operating system on a modern high-powered server will almost certainly result in that server being severely underutilized. In fact, in many businesses, servers are operating at anywhere between 5 and 25 percent of their total load capacity, thus wasting a substantial amount of processing power. Virtualization enables workloads from those underutilized servers to be consolidated to a fewer number of servers.
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