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H. Vibhu

A finger on the energy pulse.

T.E. Raja Simhan

Quick, how much power do you save by switching off all those unrequired systems? Enough to keep the computer plus two servers running for the next two hours?

This is the kind of computation companies, particularly technology companies, are doing extensively as they seek to wring out more work from electrical/electronic systems with less use of power, and thus lower their costs of keeping systems and devices ‘cool’.

And if what is good for your bills is good for the environment too, by way of reduced emissions, so much the better. ‘Green IT’ means different things to different people. Companies are approaching this from many angles — from simple moves to save power and water to complex issues such as consolidating server space.More importantly, clients have started exerting pressure on vendors to adopt green initiatives.

In IDC’s latest Green Poll in Asia-Pacific, 81 per cent of participating organisations said the ‘Green-ness’ of IT technology will become increasingly important when it comes to selecting suppliers. Some 18 per cent of organisations said they already took this factor into consideration in selecting suppliers and another 30 per cent said they were putting systems in place to start doing so in the near future, says Sumit Mukhija, National Sales Manager, Data Centre, Cisco India and Saarc.

According to G.V. Singh, CIO, Steria India, companies are receptive to the use of energy-efficient systems, including computers. Although the IT boom in India has followed the same pattern as in the West, signs point to a shift from ‘performance-per-dollar’ to ‘performance-per-watt’ as a key metric in Indian IT purchases.Businesses around the world are consuming extreme amounts of energy through use of IT, furthering today’s energy crisis, according to Steven Sams, Vice-President, Site and Facilities Services, IBM. In 2007, there will be $10 billion spent on data centre energy worldwide, and IDC predicts that power and cooling spend in the data centre will grow at eight times the rate of hardware spend, he said, while launching the company’s ‘Project Big Green’ 2.0 in India recently.

Indian companies are increasingly looking to ‘virtualisation’ to boost their power per watt. An IDC India study has predicted that the number of virtualised servers in India will double between 2007 and 2008 — rising to 45 per cent from 22 per cent.

By abstracting physical IT assets into software, virtualisation allows the consolidation of servers, thereby reducing energy costs associated with powering and cooling machines by as much as 80 per scent, says Singh of Steria.Virtualisation features are being brought into almost all IT components and services now. Cisco has consolidated most of these features into the Network itself. Also, these services can now be used for a wide range of users, says Mukhija of Cisco.

The data centre infrastructure is central to the IT architecture, wherein all content is stored, managed and disseminated. The components that make up the data centre are application servers, database servers, and storage and security devices.

By virtualising these resources, companies can offer services such as Intranet, Internet access and Contact centres to different parts of the globe from a single centralised data centre. Consolidating resources on a single location will increase the effective utilisation of the data centre and network asset, says Mukhija.

Companies are investing huge sums of money to meet their fast expanding data centre requirements. According to industry estimates, the number of installed servers in data centres is expected to grow to 44 million by 2010, says Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India.

A server uses only 15 per cent of its full capacity. Here’s how. Each operating system or application requires a dedicated server for it to be run — as a result of which, companies end up deploying multiple servers to support multiple applications. While all resources of the server may be occasionally required to run the application, for the most part, the server remains unutilised when its application is not under use but keeps guzzling precious power. As a result, companies end up footing enormous electricity bills for running these power-intensive servers, leading to wastage of resources. This is where virtualisation steps in, explains Pallavi.

According to Pallavi, virtualisation enables Green IT in three key ways:

Less wastage and recycling costs: Virtualisation creates multiple virtual servers on a single hardware machine, allowing multiple users to access applications from the same platform.

Save power: By creating several virtual machines on one physical server, virtualisation brings down the cost of running multiple hardware machines and helps save power resources.

Reduced physical space: Companies using virtualisation require less amount of physical space for storing physical machines, thereby saving on expensive real-estate investment.

Companies should work towards turning business “Green” through IT usage than focusing on making IT products “green”. They should look at ‘Green IT’ being the tool to turn their core business (services or products) processes “Green,” says Rajdeep Sahrawat, Vice-President, Nasscom.

For example, green buildings can become smart buildings through the use of sensors to monitor lighting and heating/cooling.

Similarly technology can be used to minimise travel, enable employees to work from home.IT-based analysis of a company’s energy usage can allow for better decision making on what areas to focus on to increase energy efficiency, he says.

Here’s taking a look at some energy-efficiency moves by companies.

‘Project Big Green’ includes new products and services for IBM and its clients to reduce data centre energy consumption. The company announced in August that it will redirect $1 billion a year, worldwide, across its businesses, to mobilise the company’s resources to increase the level of energy efficiency in IT. IBM will consolidate thousands of computer servers onto mainframes as part of Project Big Green. It plans to save an estimated $250 million over five years. The plan is to shrink 3,900 computer servers to about 30 of IBM’s ‘System z’ mainframes. The new server environment will consume approximately 80 per cent less energy. The discarded 3,900 servers will be recycled by IBM Global Asset Recovery Services.

Wipro plans to consolidate its data centres across the country to reduce energy consumption, according to its Chief Information Officer, Laxman K. Badiga. Wipro’s initiatives extend from energy efficient data centres to eco-friendly product engineering designs and PC ranges.

The data centres apply server virtualisation to minimise the amount of equipment required for operations. This will also reduce hardware space. The key element of Green IT is operating data centres from remote places. “Our target this year is to reduce power consumption by 5 per cent. Last year it was 4 per cent,” Badiga has said.

Wipro, also a PC manufacturer, helps customers dispose electronic waste or e-waste. It identifies suitable disposal mechanisms, manages service points across India and engages disposal agencies, says the company.

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