The Green Label

At an offhand conversation with your clients the latter is bound to touch
upon wanting his company's report card (balance sheet, profit and loss account
in this case) to look good. Then you move onto chatting about newer areas of
expansion, adopting newer technologies, investments have all been jotted down.

Chances are somewhere your advice will be asked on areas to maximize chances
of scoring an excellent percentage (read profitability). One suggestion you can
then consider offering is asking your client to switch to Green IT.

This is the latest buzzword in the IT industry. And if you thought that the
much-hyped jargon is only about additional costs and serving the environ-mental
concerns, think again.

But it is natural that while venturing such options you would want to have
all the facts on how the switchover to Green IT will help your client. Well,
wonder no more. This is where you get your gyan about Green IT, its business
benefits and how vendors are trying to popularize the concept.

Know your greens

As definitions go, IDC says that Green IT is all about “the design,
manufacture, deployment, and recycling of IT products and related materials in
an environmentally responsible manner.” But vendors say that this single
sentence does not do enough justice to the concept per se.

According to Jyoti Satyanathan, VP-Systems and Technology Group, IBM
India/South Asia Green IT is an initiative through which customers are going to
use lesser power to deliver the same results. “It is about energy efficiency and
there is a corporate social responsibility attached to it as well,” he noted.

For Maia, a company that manufactures videoconferencing tools and products,
Green IT has two aspects. One aspect is that components (semi conductor, plastic
cover, casing etc) being used in IT products today are not recyclable. Thus,
Green IT in the first place is about manufacturing components that are
environment friendly.

The other aspect is that the kind of application they create for customers
should make the environment safer. So using the video communication product can
be environment friendly as by using the videoconferencing products, a person
travels less and by thus helps conserve energy.

Definitions aside, at the end of the day every company looks forward to the
business benefits they get when they plan out their investments. Adopting Green
IT will eventually lead to a number of such benefits both in the short term as
well as in the long run. To make it simpler, 'Save today, Invest in tomorrow.'

A company can reduce carbon emissions, conserve power and hence lower its
running cost and eventually the total cost of ownership by including such
products and components in its infrastructure that are essential for running and
managing an enterprise. So starting with the desktops and notebooks to the
networking products to servers and for that matter even the chips and processors
that go into each of these machines, at every step the company can deploy and
make use of products that are green.

This aside adopting technologies and solutions like server virtualization and
server consolidation can help it save power and be more energy efficient. So,
whatever it invests in (in the form of components, servers, machines and other
ICTs), can be recovered over a long term in the form of savings made on
electricity bills.

Recycling taken care of

 What more, these products are environment friendly and hence can takes
care of your recycling problem. In India, companies

do not get the permission from the government to recycle components that contain
hazardous substances. This means you end up piling the load in your backyard or
dump the same illegally. The sensible way out is having the green components
right away so that in future you can get rid of the problem itself. Running your
business at a low cost also implies that you will be able to have more machines
installed and increase your work capability and thereby profitability.

Predominantly, Green IT

has been all about power conservation with regard to data centers and
servers. But other than technologies like server virtualization and
consolidation that are widely used while designing a date center, a huge
difference can be made by deploying such products within your IT set-up that is
made up of components that are essentially Green. Vendors across the IT industry
have gauged the need to be environmentally responsible and reducing cost by
being energy efficient.

According to sources,

40 percent of energy goes into cooling alone, in a data center.

A company can't compromise on the server, because they need the server and
for that matter even the other smaller components cannot be done away with
because they are critical in the functioning

of the server. In such a scenario, the biggest scope to save energy is in
cooling. Also, if the servers are generating less heat, you can do with less air
conditioning and hence save power.

Again, in a country like India shortage and continuity of power supply is a
huge problem and cost of power always tops the list of concerns. “We are second
or third most expensive in terms of providing the power to the industries. In
such a scenario, the customer demands a system that can save a lot of power and
consequently lower their energy bills and here is where Green IT can make a huge
difference,” noted Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power (India).

Blade helps, but not much

An IT manager will never want his data center or the server room to be down
at the cost of being energy efficient. No matter how much power it consumes or
how critical the design of the data center is, the system should be reliable and
the network should never collapse.

Sandeep Nair MD, Emerson Network Power (India)	Jyoti Satyanathan VP-Systems & Technology Group IBM India/South Asia

However, with the advent of blade servers, this problem was solved to a
larger extent. Companies were able to place a number of blade servers and stack
it up in one rack itself, as it required less space.

Hence, they could achieve the computing capacity they wanted to. Enterprises
started consolidating and started building bigger server rooms, bigger data
centers and gradually Blade servers became the best and most viable option,
keeping in mind the space consideration.

But again there are some limitations with blade servers. While, they take up
lesser space and meet your computation requirement, as a side effect they
generate a lot of heat. For instance, the one rack that earlier used to generate
2-3kilo watt of heat in a data center, will now generate 4-5kilo watt and might
even exceed the10-15kilowatt mark.

Besides, the cooling require­ments of different racks differ, depending upon
the heat generated by them. Increasing the cooling capacity will no way help the
cause as it's implications would be that you may end up using more power and
feeding more energy and there is every chance that even the cooling unit will
start emitting SO2 and other gases in the environment.

The way out Investing in blade servers is not the appropriate solution
because in the entire data center maybe only certain racks require that kind of
cooling. Does that mean one does away with the existing data center? The answer
is obviously no and as Nair puts it, “There is specific type of cooling in data
center that is known as the precion cooling and it revolves around the concept
of comfort cooling.”

Emerson realized this problem and one of the company's divisions, called
Liebert in US located those extreme density racks in a data center which require
15-20kilo watt and designed a cooling solution bearing the same in mind. This
solution is better known as XDV.

It works on the principle of air flow management and caters to the need of
every rack pertaining to it's requirement and hence does not cool the entire
data center. The initial cost of XD maybe high but the payback time will witness
the customer lower their power bills immensely and that too within a year.
Emerson has deployed XD with customers like Bharti that created country's
largest data center with 50,000 sq feet area and Dell that has put up a
manufacturing facility in Chennai, with XD.

Other vendors

IBM for one has made large investments in their bid to make mother earth
green. The company has made investment into multiple areas. One of the areas is
research, where the company has ensured that they design better products that
consume less energy.

The company has recently launched a new server called the power 6-570. This
delivers approx 60 percent more performance at the same power it used to take on
with the earlier products like the P5plus. In addition to this they invest money
into creating teams, who can advice customer how to save the power. This team
ensures that they visit the customers and audit their data centers and then
advice them on how to save energy.

“The energy audit is part of our offering where we give customers advice, on
ways in which he can reduce power. It can be as simple as moving the AC around a
bit.” added Satyanathan.

So far everything in Green IT

was all about servers, data center and other components. But from the
switching perspective, no one was really thinking about being environmentally
concerned.”

For example, if you buy

20-24 switch ports, typically you will connect it to a certain number of PCs
or devices. Many a times, 4-5 ports are never used or better still they are used
after long gaps. But the fact is that these 4-5 ports may be consuming energy to
a considerable extent despite not being in use. Again, Ethernet, as a standard
is designed for supplying power for over 100 meters.

But typically not all PCs are at a distance of 100meters. In most of offices
one will find that the distance from the switch to PC may be 20 meters or so.
Therefore, adopting switches that can reduce the supply of power depending upon
the distance will again be cost effective.

D-Link was one of the first companies to realize this following which they
contributed to Green IT in the networking technology space. This tech­nology is
popularly known as Green Ethernet. The company has recently launched energy
efficient switches that supply power only when the device is actually being used
and reduces the supply of power depending upon the distance of the computer. In
addition the components that goes into the designing of the switches are ROHS
compliant (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) and hence safe to dispose and
recyclable.

Intel, AMD join in too

Intel, the semiconductor company, makes sure that along with increased
performance the processors and chips coming out of their factory consume less
power and are energy efficient. So, for example, if a CPU two years back used to
consume 70-80watts of power. The new chips from Intel, ensures that it now
consumes 30watts of power on the desktop side. In the notebook side there are
chips that consume only 3-4watts of power.

“If 100 millions of chips start using 50-60percent less power the power
consumption level comes down immensely.” stated Sandeep of Intel.

Again, according to sources, 90 out of 100 times, the processor in the
desktop machine is limited to be used for word excel or internet browsing only.
One really does not need a high end CPU or a high end machine to run word
document and a basic machine can serve the purpose.

AMD woke up to the reality and being a company that primarily manufactures
semi­conductors for IT, complies with RoHS standards. The company for the first
time has introduced several techniques, specifica­tions and features that can
conserve power when the system is not in use or is being partially used. Thus,
Power Now feature for servers and cool and quite feature for desktops have been
designed by AMD to give companies better performance at lower cost.

Thus, both the features scale the power levels of the processor to the amount
of utilization.

To simplify, the processor works on the logic of demand based power
utilization and every time you use the machine less, it saves a lot of energy.

This aside the company is also furthering an initiative called Green
Grid2004. (Greengrid.org). It has partnered with whole lot of industry dealers
like Dell, Intel etc and through this website they impart a lot of information
on the best practices for data centers. These best practices include setting up,
running, managing and getting the best operational efficiency for the data
centers.

In 2007, the company also launched next generation product called the Cool
Core. This product, takes the energy efficiency to the next level in terms of
granularity.

A close look at the processor design, suggests that it has a number of
modules in it. Most of the applications don't make use of the entire module.

For example, if you are using your exchange server you don't need your
floating point module to run. Therefore, if the application is not using certain
module it switches that particular module off and this way the device becomes
more energy efficient and gives enhanced performance.

Another example is that of the mainframe. One can consolidate servers to
main­frames and make effective usage of the space. For example, 3,600 servers
can be converged into 36 mainframes by consoli­dating and by replacing those
3,600 servers and consolidating the load onto 36 mainframes; you stand to save
power and space on a large scale.

Western Digital has recently launched its environmentally friendly,
energy-conscious Green Powerâ„¢ family of WDenterprise hard drive products. WD
RE2-GP hard drives are designed with power savings as the primary attribute and
they offer massive capacity with significant power savings and lower total cost
of ownership compared to other competitive enterprise-class drives.

AOC, a company that manufactures and sells monitors-has launched 15-inch wide
TFT monitor that saves power immensely. This monitor requires only 15watt power
whereas the minimum require­ment is that of 30watts. This product does not
compromise on quality and yet is energy efficient.

Manoj Rathi Diamond Infotech, Kolkata

Sun Microsystems again has Eco Ready Kit that consists of three solutions
that help customers improve performance and reduce energy. So while, Eco
Assessment Kit provides a comprehensive view of customers' datacenter and
infrastructure requirements with suggestions for energy efficiency improvements,
the Eco Optimi­za­­tion Kit offers complete solution to help customers optimize
and refresh their datacenter while properly recycling old equipment to reduce
e-waste. Also Eco Virtualization Kit offers solution that helps overcome power
and space limitations with measurable reductions in power and cooling
requirements and systems footprint, along with improvements in system
utilization, compute capacity and security.

There are roadblocks

Going fully green is something that is not practically possible at one go.
So don't think all your clients can immediately migrate to it. A company has to
do it in a phased manner. “A customer first has to believe that he wants to do
it and then he goes about doing it in stages. First he should focus on what he
wants to change internally. Then he can plan out changes for future keeping in
mind, the latest technology. Finally, he can decide the time span in which he
wants to go for the change in infrastructure,” added Akhilesh of Future Soft
Solutions.

Convincing customers to adopt to green IT however, is not a cake walk. There
are number of reasons behind the same. In the first place, the customers have
already created the facility and most importantly, prior to this the awareness
of green IT did not exist.

“The best way to sell Green IT is never putting across the idea that it is
good for environment as they are more bothered about their current expenses. You
explain the saving on operational cost and that it will be an extra earning and
people will accept it,” mentioned Nair.

Ravi Kumar, CTO, Choice Solutions added, “Technology is not mature enough
mature in terms of price and that is the biggest hurdle when it comes to
convincing the customer to deploy and make use of Green solutions.” Apart from
offering server virtualization and consolidation Choice also offers flywheel UPS
that essentially helps conserve energy.

Manoj Rathi of Diamond Infotech elaborated, “The problem arises when the
customer needs to be explained about the actual savings as opposed to his
investments, in short in return on investments.”

He also added that the benefits customers get are in the form of savings made
on power, cost and space. Within a data center UPS, backup and even the battery
takes up space and hence leads to unnecessary increase in the size of data
centers. By using green components customers can lessen their concerns
considerably.

Pooja Sharma

(poojas@cybermedia.co.in)