Outsourcing IT and datacentre functions to third party providers can deliver energy savings of up to 40 percent and help reduce firms' exposure to green legislation, according to a new whitepaper from IT analyst firm IDC.

The study, which was commissioned by managed IT services provider Rackspace, argues that specialist IT outsourcing providers can exploit economies of scale by sharing the same datacentre infrastructure across large numbers of customers, allowing them to reduce overall energy use.

James Eibisch, research director at IDC's European telecoms and networking group said that outsourcing IT work to third parties also reduces the risk of increased compliance pressures for IT directors.

"Although today the EU would like the IT industry to regulate itself, this won't be the case forever," he predicted. "Today, legislation is concentrated on areas such as materials and recycling, but discussions are going on within the EU and NGOs to extend environmental regulation to IT and communications, and companies must consider the future implications of this for their business."

Fabio Torlini, marketing director at Rackspace, said firms could sidestep many of these imminent regulations by handing IT functions to specialist providers.

He also argued that IT outsourcing firms also had greater freedom to invest in the latest energy efficient IT kit and renewable energy technologies. "Installing these new technologies is a massive investment, but when as a service provider you split that investment out per customer it becomes manageable," he explained. "Individual IT departments don't have that luxury and find it harder to justify these investments."

He added that Rackspace had recently authorised just such an investment and was preparing to unveil a new datacentre facility next year that will be powered using a biomass-fuelled power plant and will incorporate the latest energy efficient server and cooling technologies.

Posted by James Murray on October 8, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Regular readers will know that over the past few months BusinessGreen has run a series of live web seminars on the emergence of the green IT department in conjunction with its sister titles IT Week and Computing.

Covering the reasons for more environmentally-friendly IT kit, the best practices for deploying such technologies, the companies that are already embracing green IT and the most responsible means of disposing of old kit this series of online discussion shows featured a broad range of expert panellists and attracted a wide audience of IT professionals.

Now to mark the end of the web seminars IT Week this week features a special report exploring the key issues raised by our panellists and detailing some of the environmental best practices IT managers should now be embracing.

You can read about why IT as an industry is leading the way in the transition towards low carbon technologies on our dedicated microsite here, read our experts' answers to viewers' green IT questions here, read the case against renewable energy-powered datacentres here, take a look at the case for virtualisation here, and get an insight into why re-using old IT kit is a greener option than recycling it here.

Also keep an eye out for an additonal special report on September 20th in BusinessGreen's sister title Computing looking at some of the IT departments that are pioneering greener business models and technologies.

Posted by James Murray on September 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over half of large companies are already planning projects to reduce the environmental impact of their datacentres, according to an imminent new study from US datacentre operator Digital Realty Trust.

According to reports from Information Week, Digital Realty Trust will later this month release the results of a survey of 100 senior execs at companies with sales of over $1bn that found 55 percent already have strategies in place to limit their datacentre's energy use.

Jim Smith, VP of engineering at Digital Realty Trust, is quoted as claiming the results prove that after several years of concerns about increasing energy costs and datacentre space restrictions many IT chiefs are now turning green rhetoric into action. "Most companies will tell you they're on the quest to be green," he said. "But most are beyond just saying that."

The survey also reports that 60 percent of those questioned believe their green strategy will become an important factor in vendor selection over the next two years, suggesting that many of the leading hardware vendors will soon be vindicated in their adoption of green marketing and technology strategies.

Vendors such as HP, IBM, Sun, Intel and AMD, amongst others have all invested heavily in enhancing the energy efficiency of their hardware portfolios in recent years, while the success of virtualisation software is at least partly attributed to its ability to reduce datacentre power consumption.

Posted by James Murray on September 7, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sumir Karayi, CEO at desktop management software specialist 1E, insists that automation holds key to PC turn off campaigns

BusinessGreen: How big a problem is the issue of PCs being left on over night?
Sumir Karayi: There was a recent US study that showed that 60 percent of PCs are left on any given night. Corporate America has just under 100m PCs, so that is 60m PCs being left on each night. Even if you halve that figure on the assumption that around half of desktops are typically set to hibernate when they are not in use that still means 30 million are fully on. Estimates show that equates to $2bn worth of energy being wasted a year.

How does 1E propose to tackle the problem?
We started ten years ago with a focus on reducing the cost and time of managing Windows for large organisations. We quickly realised there was this issue with being able to remotely turn the PCs on and off, and that is when we developed out first bit of software, SMSWakeUp, which allowed administrators to easily turn machines on over the network. We were working with a customer, Swiss Bank, which found that as soon as they could turn the machines on at night to patch them they realised $4m in energy cost savings. That was a real eye opener and then we started to investigate why machines weren't being turned off and what we could do to address the problem. From there we developed our NightWatchman suite which allows firms to automatically and remotely turn off PCs that have been left on.

Technically how do you turn on a PC that has been switched off?
There is a switch in the settings of the PC called Wake-on-LAN. This switch stays on when you turn off the PC, drawing just one to five watts, and listens out for a network packet called a magic packet, which turns the computer on. The technology is very simple and is industry standard, but when you scale it out to large deployments it becomes very difficult to manage without a high degree of automation.

There are plenty of solutions in this area and as you admit the core technology is pretty simple. Where is the differentiator in your products?
The issue of desktop management has three stakeholders - the CIO, who needs the machines patched, updated and rebooted occasionally; the facilities or CSR manager who wants the energy bill reduced; and the user who don't want their PC turned off when they are using it or downloading files and who don't want data lost when their machine is rebooted. In our opinion most solutions in this area only address one or two of the stakeholders. We wrote NightWatchman to address all these stakeholders, so CIOs have the ability to turn on a machine, patch, and turn it off remotely; facilities gets reporting capabilities to see how much energy is saved; and the user gets a solution that automatically assesses whether the machine is in use before turning it off and saves any files from both the previous save and the state they are in at the time of shut down.

We've all heard about concerns about the environment and energy use, but how much money can really be saved from just turning off a PC?
UK estimates claim it can save an average of £40 per year in energy costs, while Energy Star in the US estimates anything between $25 to $75 a year. Obviously there is a lot of variation depending on energy costs and turn off rates before deployment, but if you consider we are deployed on 7 million seats globally, that is a lot of money.

How much does the software cost?
We have sliding prices based on the size of the deal, but we aim for an ROI within three months. That means you can get the cost back in the form of power savings within three months, and that calculation does not include the soft savings in the form of lower support costs and enhanced security.

Isn't this a classic case of over-engineering. You are providing an automated solution for a problem that wouldn't exist if people just turned off their PCs. Isn't it cheaper and easier for firms to run a campaign to get people to turn off their PCs?
I would entirely recommend that firms have a green communications agenda. But turn off campaigns can't easily report on the savings they achieve and as a result the savings are difficult to validate. What NightWatchman gives you is a clear benchmark from which to base your energy savings. As a result we have been able to do deals where we charge based on the amount of energy saved. Also the fact is that communication campaigns only get you so far and you need an automated solution so that you can reboot remotely and ensure everything is patched correctly.

Some people maintain that turning PCs on and off daily reduces their reliability. Is there any truth in this?
It is an absolute fallacy that turning PCs off and on means they don’t last as long. It is a myth, and in fact the opposite is true as you place less pressure on the moving parts if you turn the machine off.

How do you plan to develop the product portfolio going forward?
We have just released SMSWakeUp version 5, which supports Vista and has improved scalability and enhanced reporting capabilites. We are also about to launch version 5 of NightWatchman, which also features improved reporting capabilities, including predictive reporting that allows a firm to predict the energy savings it could achieve, and also boasts Vista integration designed to exploit the new power saving technology in Vista.

And beyond that?
We are investing heavily in a solution for the datacentre and we aim to have something ready by the end of the year. There is a tendency in the datacentre to save energy by throwing out working servers in favour of new, more energy efficient models, but a lot of savings can be achieved with existing infrastructure through better power management. We want to provide a suite that reports on datacentre energy use and identifies areas of efficiency and inefficiency so you can optimise without decommissioning existing kit. We want to apply the NightWatchman logic to the datacentre environment.

So you'd have a solution that automatically turns off unused servers?
Initially we'd just focus on reporting, but from there adding the automation would be relatively easy.

Are people really going to accept a solution that turns off their servers?
The biggest issue with the datacentre is the mindset change that is required. Most datacentres are 24x7 operations with all the servers running 24x7 and people believe there is a large degree of risk in turning machines off or even just changing processor states to reduce power draw. But this is a hugely inefficient scenario and it is perfectly plausible to turn more machines off when they are not in use. We want to give IT managers the information they need to do this. It won’t come quickly and there is a long road ahead. Many businesses see it as easier to just keep buying more servers, but it is entirely possible technically to turn them off and just turn them on when they are needed. Too many people design a datacentre from the start for maximum capacity. They think "right, I need 10,000 users and I'll design for 10,000 users". They end up with 50 servers online when they could have spent the first year just running two.

About Sumir Karayi

Sumir Karayi is CEO and CTO at windows management software specialist 1E, which he co-founded in 1998.

Previously he had worked managing and supporting PC based networks at Microsoft, Lombard, Reuters and the BBC.

He holds BEng and MSc degrees from Warwick University, specialising in Electronic Engineering and IT for Manufacturing. 

Posted by James Murray on August 13, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just returned from a roundtable discussion with Oracle's president Charles Phillips in which he mused on the current state of the software giant in a manner typical of a man who has spent more time than is healthy undertaking media training – ie he delivered a series of supremely articulate responses while saying very little of any actual interest.

However, one response did jump out which served to highlight the extent to which environmental issues continue to remain a niche concern for vast swathes of the IT industry.

Phillips was asked the now de rigeur press conference question about what the company was doing to limit the environmental footprint of its products, to which he rather dismissively responded: "There are only so many things we can do as we don't make the things that use the power."

As one hack pointed out this is more than a little disingenuous because a huge number of the machines that do use the power are only plugged in so that they can run Oracle's assorted databases and applications.

Perhaps a little chastened, Phillips said that its new 11g database had two "green features" in the form of advanced partitioning and compression, both of which limit the energy and costs associated with data storage.

However, despite Oracle's latest innovations it was Phillips' initial response that appeared to more neatly capture where energy efficiency sits in the list of Oracle's priorities.

He is obviously right that there is only so much Oracle and other software vendors can do to limit IT's gargantuan energy footprint and that the bulk of the responsibility for tackling the energy crisis must sit with the hardware vendors.

But software developers still have a huge role to play in creating solutions that require less computing power and less storage, even if it is an approach antithetical to their entrenched desire to develop software that strains at the limits of the hardware's capabilities.

I'd be intrigued to know how many developers at Oracle - and SAP and Microsoft come to that - have been instructed to consider energy requirements when they are designing software. My guess is not too many.

Unfortunately though there is no way hardware vendors can maximise improvements in energy efficiency unless software developers begin to consider the power implications of their work. Few of them would say it out loud for fear of riling their biggest partners and jeopardising one of the main reasons customers instigate hardware upgrades, but they will need far greater co-operation from the software sector than they are getting at the moment if their green aspirations are to prove successful.

It is not a perfect analogy, but the stance summarised by Phillips is not unlike a designer working on a car chassis insisting that there is not much he can do to improve energy efficiency on the grounds that it is improvements to the engine that are really required.

With IT, as with all other industries, truly green business models are only possible through holistic development that incorporates everyone involved in the process. The sooner Phillips and his counterparts at the world's biggest software companies realise this the better.

Posted by James Murray on August 8, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the big risks when announcing a new green business initiative is the fact that it can simply serve to highlight the things you were doing wrong in the first place.

Back when the supermarkets first started stocking fair trade products I remembered thinking that, by definition, everything else they stocked should now be labelled unfair trade. Now, every time a company releases a press release claiming they are now giving out 30 percent fewer plastic bags or have cut their lighting bills or reduced their product packaging the cynical part of me wants to say "why the hell were you handing out so many bags/leaving so many lights on/packaging everything in 30 sheets of cling film in the first place?"

I was reminded of this last week when talking to Steve Bawden, CTO at IBM's server and storage division about the company's hugely admirable project to slash its datacentre energy consumption by 80 percent by consolidating around 3,900 of its servers onto 30 mainframes.

The question that sprung to mind was if these System z mainframes were so great - and IBM has sounded as enthusiastic as a South American football commentator when talking them up – then how did the company get into a situation where it was running the best part of 4,000 servers in the first place? Why has it taken until now for IBM to realise the most efficient way of setting up its infrastructure is based around a technology that it has had since before I was born?

Bawden's response was that IBM followed the same model of many other firms whereby individual departments had their own budgets and were left to invest in their own systems. Over time this led to a highly distributed infrastructure, which may have meant each department faced lower upfront costs for their IT but also proved extremely inefficient in terms of energy use and management costs.

This inefficiency was tolerated because as long as energy costs remained low the inherent profligacy of running thousands of servers with low rates of utilisation did minimal damage to the bottom line even while it did significant damage to the environment.

Even when energy and management costs did begin to rise it was less than easy to transfer across - or should that be back? - onto mainframes because major projects had to be undertaken to make the various applications portable.

IBM maintains that much of this work has now been done and as a result the consolidation of its 3,900 servers onto 30 System z mainframes should, in the words of Bawden, prove "relatively simple".

Of course it is slightly unfair to dwell on how IBM got itself into such an inefficient scenario when it is now committed to resolving the problem. But it does serve to illustrate quite how far down the list of priorities energy conservation has been over the past few decades and how horrendously inefficient the IT infrastructure of even the most tech savvy companies has become as a result.

Where IBM is to be praised is in its recognition of these facts and its willingness to try and solve the problem by returning to a technology that many regard as something of a dinosaur. Should the company prove successful in its consolidation project, and there is no reason to suspect otherwise, then it might just pave the way for an industry wide swing away from sprawling datacentres and back towards the mainframe.

After all it is a technology that, as Bawden observes, is significantly more energy efficient and easier to manage than a never-ending sea of servers. "It's like with transport," he muses. "It's always going to be greener for people to get on the train rather than drive into work on hundreds of mopeds."

Posted by James Murray on August 6, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

IT may not be in the sights of environmental protestors just yet, but with emissions rising IT departments can't expect to avoid their ire for much longer. Amy Sims argues that a new green IT leadership board could help IT chiefs lead their firms' green transformation.

The airline industry, car owners, and big business are all commonly blamed for causing climate change. But you don't see many scathing headlines about the IT sector killing off the polar bears, or protestors gathered outside a business demanding that they cool their data centres more efficiently.

IT-related emissions have for the most part evaded the spotlight, although they now account for a significant percentage of global carbon emissions with estimates generally ranging from two to three percent, hovering very closely to those of the climate change poster child, aviation.

At Global Action Plan we work with businesses every day to help them lighten their environmental impact and save money, and we’ve noticed an increasing need for guidance with IT systems and operations. Many IT departments never even see the company energy bill and are unaware of the level of emissions their data centres and office equipment are churning out.

To help support businesses in this area we are leading the UK’s first end user green IT board which will be supported by our newly appointed green IT manager.

Chaired by our director Trewin Restorick and sponsored by Logicalis, the Environmental IT Leadership Team aims to create an independent expert user group focused on exploring and publishing best practice sustainable IT strategies. While there have been other groups driven from the manufacturer side, this is the first from user perspective.

An interesting mix of organisations and businesses sit on the board, including Sony UK, the British Medical Association, E.ON UK, Lloyds TSB, CQS, the University of Cumbria and John Lewis Partnership. This variety illustrates just how pervasive and important IT is today in reducing carbon emissions.

The board will act to share knowledge within the group and wider business community and will look at policy issues, engage with government, and particularly examine ways to overcome some seemingly contradictory policy such as storing data for long periods of time whilst keeping energy use down.

Many companies are bombarded with information and confused about what is best solution for them. This board will help with independent analysis, breaking down techy and political jargon to give clear advice on best practice.

Acting almost like a select committee the board will have the opportunity to question political, industry, technology, and expert guests at its meetings.

One of the first aims for the group is to steer a research project that will be conducted by Global Action Plan. This report will be launched at an event at the House of Commons in the autumn with the backing of Peter Ainsworth MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

This research will contain two main parts: 1) Establishing the carbon footprint of IT in the UK from equipment and the energy consumed, including indirect footprint of using equipment such as the air conditioning needed to keep it cool. 2) A survey of how companies are approaching greening their IT and where they are at the moment in this process. For example, do they have a 'switch off' policy at night? Are they experiencing rapid growth in their data storage?

While there is much to be done to improve the efficiency of IT, it is important to stress how technology can greatly help businesses reduce their emissions. At GAP we've seen many businesses benefit from so-called 'intelligent building' features such as motion detection powered lighting, grey water collection systems, and smart thermostats that keep buildings at a comfortable but energy efficient temperature. Not to mention video and phone conferencing reducing the need for business travel.

But most important is the behaviour of the people in the businesses who are using all this technology. A business can have the most efficient technology around, but if the employees don't use it in a sustainable way its efficiency is greatly reduced. At GAP we know every employee can make a difference by taking simple actions such as switching off their monitors when away from their desks, turning off computers at the end of the day, and only printing documents when absolutely necessary.

Stay tuned for further developments on the IT leadership board and Global Action Plan's upcoming green IT research.

Amy Sims is Communications Manager at environmental charity Global Action Plan

Posted by James Murray on July 20, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Green Grid IT industry consortium is said to be fast approaching an agreement on the best metric to measure overall datacentre efficiency, according to a source familiar with recent discussions on the matter.

Speaking recently, Steve Sams vice president of global site and facilities services at IBM, said that he believed the group was set to endorse a measure originally proposed by a team at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in 2003 that divides the amount of power going into a datacentre with the amount used for productive work to give an understanding of the entire datacentres' energy efficiency.

The most efficient datacentres typically boast a score of 1.5 – meaning that for every 1.5Kw going into the facility 1Kw is used to run the servers, storage and telecoms technologies and only 0.5Kw are wasted or used for cooling and other purposes. In contrast, the least efficient datacentres score around 3.5.

"My personal opinion is this is the metric that will be agreed," said Sams. "It's very simple and it has a lot of support. The only debate has been over how the metric should change or be weighted for a datacentre with tier one resilience against one with tier four resilience. But the energy efficiency gap between those different datacentres should be very small."

A spokesperson for the Green Grid neither confirmed nor denied that it was close to selecting the benchmarks it will endorse, but they insisted the group was committed to reaching agreement soon on a raft of new standards. "While there is no definite deadline for specifications we are working hard together as a consortium to bring these metrics to the industry as soon as possible," they said.

The imminent Green Grid metric is the latest in a raft of new energy efficiency metrics expected iun the coming months and aimed at datacentre managers. Most notably a new Energy Star label covering servers is planned for next year, while at the other end of the IT spectrum the group behind the Top 500 list of super computers plans to launch a Green 500 list of the most energy efficient super computers this November based on a FLOPS per watt metric.

Posted by James Murray on July 16, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

EDF Energy has revealed plans for a major overhaul at one of its datacentres that it hopes will dramatically improve its energy efficiency and make it "a point of reference" for other businesses trying to limit the carbon footprint of their IT infrastructure.

Speaking exclusively to BusinessGreen, Benoit Laclau managing director of Business Improvement and Technology at the company, said that it had this week given the go ahead for a major refit of one of its existing datacentres that it claims will deliver a 40 to 50 percent reduction in energy consumption.

"We have decided to focus on improving an existing site as building a new site has a major carbon footprint attached to that process," he said. "We want to show our customers what you can do in terms of energy efficiency with a brown field datacentre."

Laclau added that the company was currently looking for a partner to help with the deployment of cutting edge green datacentre technologies and techniques such as virtualisation, localised cooling and green roofing. The company aims to have the refurbishment completed and the datacentre online by mid 2008.

"As an energy company we have always been mindful of environmental issues and already have one datacentre in Plymouth where we use waste heat from the datacentre to heat the rest of the building," said Laclau. "But now we want to take it to the next level and become a real point of reference for other companies."

The new project represents one of the first steps in EDF's wider environmental strategy, unveiled earlier this month, which details how it plans to slash the intensity of CO2 emissions from its power plants by 60 percent by 2020 and cut CO2 emissions from its offices and depots by 30 percent by 2012.

Posted by James Murray on June 28, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

In many ways the launch today of the WWF's new Climate Savers Computing Initiative provides the perfect blueprint for how to launch a green industry group.

It has the backing of over 30 major players, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, HP IBM, Lenovo and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); it sets out stringent targets, including a reduction in computer power consumption of 50 percent by 2010; it has a clear focus on the problem posed by around half the energy drawn by PCs being wasted and lucid technical targets for tackling that problem; and it has the endorsement of a globally recognised charity that cannot afford to be seen as a corporate stooge and as such should ensure the scheme is vigilantly policed.

In short, it is a welcome and well thought out initiative and puts to shame some of the bandwagon jumping green IT groups that have emerged in the past few months.

And yet, I can't help thinking that this latest initiative raises very real concerns that a plethora of standards and green IT groups could ultimately confuse customers and even undermine the entire green computing movement.

The Climate Savers group has been very keen to point out that it has the endorsement of the US Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the popular Energy Star labelling scheme for energy efficient electrical equipment, and that its technical standards will build on Energy Star's standards.

For example, 2007 Energy Star specifications require that PC power supplies meet at least 80 percent minimum efficiency, while manufacturers wishing to have their kit certified under the Climate Saver's Initiative would have to meet a minimum of 90 percent by 2010.

But while the new requirements may outstrip those included under Energy Star they also beg the question as to why we need yet another energy efficiency label? Why not just crank up the requirements for Energy Star, which already has considerable traction and brand recognition, particularly in the US.

Catriona McAlister, who works on the Energy Star scheme in the UK, defended the decision, claiming that "whilst Energy Star [aims] to qualify the top performing 25 percent of the market, the Climate Savers Initiative may eventually provide a mechanism for purchasers to identify the very best of the energy efficient computers on the market, and as they are working closely with… the Energy Star label it is likely that the two initiatives will complement each other going forwards".

But if there is a need for a gold standard that goes beyond the current Energy Star specs why not introduce an Energy Star Gold or some such that would mean we would still have one unified standard.

The Climate Savers scheme, while admirable, could simply add confusion to the market. Its stringent standards may mean that only the most energy efficient IT kit available gains its certification, but meanwhile manufacturers who miss out would still be able to achieve Energy Star labels and advertise those to customers. Consumers and businesses hard pressed to wade through the different technical specifications would be forgiven for thinking one energy efficiency label is as good as the other, which patently they are not. 

Of course, those behind the Climate Savers group could point to the fact that as a government run scheme Energy Star hasn't exactly broken any world speed records in developing new standards for PCs and is still at least a year off introducing standards for servers. An industry group, they could accurately argue, is likely to be more agile in developing stricter standards and ensuring they are met.

But if this is the case what is wrong with expanding the Green Grid consortium, which launched earlier this year and has many of the same members as the new WWF scheme.

A spokesman for Intel again insisted there was no overlap between the two groups and that they would prove complementary with the Green Grid focused on servers and datacentres and the WWF group focusing more on PCs and client devices.

Fair enough, but the Climate Savers standards do cover 1U/2U single- and dual-socket servers and again where is the harm in expanding an established green IT group rather than introducing yet another scheme with the attendant risks of customer confusion and duplicated work.

If you are being charitable then the emergence of these multiple green groups are simply the result of an industry exuberance that serves to highlight how seriously the whole issue of energy efficiency is being taken, rather than a machiavellian attempt to confuse customers.

However, we also have to accept that there is a very real risk that this glut of green groups, labels and targets will almost inevitably make it harder for customers to compare vendors' various energy efficiency claims.

If the IT industry is really serious about enhancing energy efficiency then perhaps it is time to call a moratorium on further energy efficiency labelling schemes, each with their own agenda and priorities, and instead try and encourage genuine industry wide adoption of the standards promoted by the existing consortia.

Posted by James Murray on June 13, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)