By Matthew Sparkes, .
With increasing pressure on companies to be more environmentally
friendly – from shareholders, the Government and the public – staff at
every level are being forced to learn new green skills, and IT managers
are by no means exempt.
The IT industry is currently responsible for around two per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the same as the aviation industry, but IT’s emissions are
growing at a much faster rate. BT alone uses 0.7 per cent of the UK’s
electricity supply.
Reducing the environmental impact of an IT department is no easy
task, and the effectiveness of many common strategies is dubious, to
say the least. Carbon offsetting, for example, may appease customers
and give the marketing department something to show off, but the
real-world benefits are debatable. So, what can be done? Here are ten
strategies that really work.
1. Teleconferencing
Teleconferencing has been around for decades, and videoconferencing
has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Despite this,
though, tens of thousands of people fly to meetings abroad every day.
The benefit of face-to-face conversation is undeniable, but modern,
high-definition videoconferencing has brought remarkable clarity to
what was once a flaky technology, and the price is falling rapidly.
For international companies, investment in multiple videoconferencing rooms – or just renting the rooms from Cisco
– could save hundreds of tons of carbon emissions every year, and pay
for itself in travel savings within a year. Overall IT spending and
energy consumption may rise, but the bigger picture reveals significant
savings.
2. Ditch paper
The phrase “paperless office” is inextricably linked with 1970s
‘Tomorrow’s World’ episodes, but the idea has made little progress
towards the mainstream. The undeniable fact is that people still work
with print outs everyday, and printers are one of the biggest offenders
as far as office energy users go.
Around 40 per cent of those currently in use need to be manually
turned off, but regularly aren’t. Paper is also an
environmentally-draining product, requiring the felling of trees and
the use of huge quantities of bleach. Sourcing recycled paper, making
duplex printing the default, and investing in printers that
automatically power down are easy first steps.
Better still, a PIN-based collection system encourages staff to only
print what is necessary and keeps logs to highlight heavy-use areas.
3. E-documents and online tools
Another approach is to reduce the need for staff to print documents
at all, by making online experiences better. Internal tools, if badly
designed, will steer people towards paper alternatives, so design them
better. For example, holiday request forms are printed out in their
hundreds every year in most offices, only to be read by HR, entered
into a database and disposed of. A one-off investment in a
well-designed online tool – possibly built into the existing intranet –
will eventually yield large savings, and the same can easily apply to
customer facing services.
“30 per cent of our online banking customers are enrolled in
paperless statements. Needless to say, that’s a significant expense
saved for us,” Catherine Palmieri, managing director of Citibank.com, was quoted as saying at the recent Green IT conference in London.
4. Consolidated data centres
Large companies usually have geographically distributed data
centres, which can be inefficient because of the duplicated overheads
involved. One data centre will use less power than two running the same
amount of hardware, as lighting and cooling costs will be lower – all
areas the British Computer Society is investigating with the Carbon Trust.
Consolidation also makes maintenance and installation of new
hardware easier, and cuts down on the need for support staff to travel,
further reducing energy use. Of course, centralised hardware can be
seen as placing all your eggs in one basket, but off-site backup firms
can easily solve this problem.
5. Virtualisation
Virtualisation is booming in popularity, and it’s easy to see why,
as it offers cost reductions in the server room and simplifies
maintenance. One of the biggest advantages, though, is in energy
savings. By reducing the number of servers needed, and making more
efficient use of the ones that are left running, your company can cut
down on energy bills and cooling. It’s estimated that for every pound
spent on hardware from an IT budget, 50 pence is spent on cooling and
energy costs, so this can easily add up.
Currently, the average server uses less than 55 per cent of its
potential, and with dual core processors becoming the norm this is only
going to get worse, as many applications are ill-equipped to take
advantage of multiple cores. Virtualisation leader VMware claims that
the average consolidation ratio is 10 to one – a single server can run
the workload of ten standard servers as virtual machines. Virtual
machines can even be moved from one server to another in real time, so
even more servers can be shut off at night or during holidays when
demand decreases.
6. Home working
Home working is an idea that has gained a lot of momentum since the
wide-scale adoption of home broadband. With almost all office work now
done on a PC, it’s possible for staff to sign in and work seamlessly,
no matter where they are.
This has several benefits. The demand for space and power in the
office will go down, saving significantly in rent and utility charges.
But there’s an ulterior motive, too. BT admitted in a recent
investigation of home-working that 60 per cent of the time employees
saved by not having to travel, they ended up giving back by working
extra hours. And Microsoft has recently found in a separate study that home working can save employees £500 a year.
Whatever the true motivation, in the next few years employers will
further embrace the idea that work is an activity, not a building.
7. Server rooms
As the cost of running and cooling servers is so high, huge energy
savings can be made by making the server room more efficient. The more
time and money invested in this, the greater the savings, but small
changes can be put into practice immediately.
For a start, most server rooms are brilliantly lit, all day, every
day, for no reason. Installing motion-sensitive lighting can, over long
periods of time, reduce a company’s energy use considerably.
Closing any leaks in air conditioning systems can also help, and
companies can be brought in to monitor airflow and make suggestions on
new layouts that will make greater use of the cooling power you already
have, by identifying any hot spots.
8. Desktops and the grid
There’s a huge computing resource that almost all companies have,
and few take full advantage of: user’s desktops. Most of the day, these
machines are barely idling – checking email and writing documents
barely taxes a modern processor, and there are times when they’re not
used at all.
Some companies are starting to make use of all those spare cycles, such as Dresdner Kleinwort.
“The cost of supercomputers isn’t very economical and isn’t very
scalable,” says David Doherty, one of the company’s developers. “Every
single computer in every office location is hooked up to the bank’s
network and has a small piece of software installed on it that allows
it to communicate with the grid. This software does absolutely nothing
until someone logs off their machine or the screensaver comes on while
the employee goes out for a pub lunch. At this point, the grid sends it
a bunch of files with an executable that is run on the machine.”
9. Turn it off
Assuming you’re not making use of desktop power during the night,
those machines need to be switched off. Asking employees to turn off
their desktops is one of the least effective ways of making this happen
– people forget, or are too lazy to do it.
One way around this is to force it. Set all machines to power down
unless active at a certain time in the evening, or by using automatic
remote shutdown tools.
The Government itself is thinking of doing this – and expects to save £10 million a year in energy costs.
10. Think holistically
The final thing that companies should do to save power is think on a
holistic level, and investigate unusual ways to save energy.
HP recently spent time redesigning a desktop case, which involved an
initial outlay in research and design and retooling overheads. However,
within a month, the more efficient design saved the equivalent of the
Eiffel Tower in steel.
It’s important that companies approach reducing the environmental
impact of their operations on a wider scale – providing home desktops
and broadband connections for employees may seem like an expensive
overhead, but could yield huge savings in real estate rental and
utility charges, not to mention reducing the carbon footprint of each
employee by reducing their need to travel.
The answer to the issue may not be an obvious one, but every company needs to find it.
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