Obsessing Over Green

The IT manager of a manufacturing firm is seeking insights into green practices that can drive data centre efficiency

21 June 2012

THE SITUATION...
How will Prateek Sinha ensure that his organisation supports him in making green an all pervasive habit?
It is obvious that CIOs and data centre managers have found it tough to balance organisational pressures with limited budgets while maintaining the same efficiency and output. Sinha, senior IT manager of a large manufacturing company, is faced with a similar challenge. He has to increase
efficiency to optimise gains from power and cooling while understanding their criticality and availability for IT operations, as most often outages are triggered either by electrical or thermal issues. Sinha finds that the initial cost of setting up a data centre is only five per cent of the total cost over its entire life span of 15-20 years and energy costs make up most of it. Sinha’s challenges aggravate as energy consumption is a critical concern of IT.
According to BEE, design and advance solutions can reduce power requirement by over 30 per cent. But it is not a complete solution, as most organisations are not willing to make changes. The major constraints for Sinha stem from the fact that he plans to implement the new technology at a very premature stage and gaining the acceptance of the middle management is also a challenge.
Gaining micro level details is also difficult as the data centre environment is very complex, enveloped in legacy systems and applications which consume more than 50 per cent of the energy. Another key challenge Sinha faces is meeting business goals and demands. These call for sustainability- based sources to derive competitive advantage and integration of environmental aspects into the corporate strategy.
Sinha intends seeking certain insights into the smart practices that he can adopt to drive data centre efficiency without disrupting the existing technological deployments. Besides, he plans to make green all pervasive across the company and evolve a model to justify it.
Against this backdrop, there are two questions that Sinha searches answers to:
THE BIG QUESTIONS1) What technologies does Prateek Sinha need to adopt to optimise data centre efficiency?
2) What smart practices does he need to adopt to make green all pervasive? (So he can justify the costs and savings thereof.)
Sharat Airani, Chief - IT (Systems & Security), Forbes Marshall
First Answer
Global energy crisis is everywhere. There is a huge demand for energy and in the absence of immediate solutions, it is necessary to use energy generated from existing sources more judiciously. In this context, Prateek Sinha must try out new and mature technologies. Internally, he must conduct a thorough, hands-on testing to gain the acceptance of the middle management. The whole process may take him some time, but he will finally succeed. The immediate solution that he can implement is bringing in virtualisation solutions to address his need. Along with this proven technology, Thin Clients are the best option. This will indirectly help him protect the IP. It is an injustice to start working on RoI from day one. Just consider the long-term usage and then calculate the benefits on that basis. Virtualisation and consolidation play an important role as technology has proved beneficial at this stage. Over all, consider the entire IT equipment from a green perspective and not just the data centre. The reason being, there is so much that Sinha can save outside of the data centre, which is critical to ensure green IT.
Second AnswerIt is important to build a strong team of IT footsloggers to execute the project. Boosting the team’s confidence is critical. Knowledge sharing and building the team’s imagination on the success of this project is crucial as well. Set up a test lab to bring in a balance between the actual users and the IT team. Walk a thin line between walking ahead of and with users, to convince them to go virtual and to accept a new theory.
IT is projected to be driving green; and there is big buzz around green IT because of its purported ability to reduce consumption with intelligent technologies that streamline and conserve environment. Hence, the top driver for success is an information architecture strategy.
Approach to power management is derived from four factors—discover, measure, analyse and save. Sinha can adopt a dashboard to demonstrate real-time status, events, power consumption, peak load and savings. Detailed reporting will enable him to track and manage energy consumption at an organisational level. With integrated performance and energy measurements, he can manage IT utilisation, energy usage, capacity and demand efficiently. There are also utilities which allow defining power policies centrally and these can be applied to desktops/servers remotely.
Overall, what he can hope to see are reduced operational costs, low carbon footprints, strong corporate position and community commitment and improved operational efficiency. Green IT initiatives emerging out of the data centre will include power management, reduction in gas emissions and efficient recycling of equipment.
Senthil Sundaramurthy Director, Bloomedha Info Solutions Ltd
First AnswerAs a first step towards data centre energy optimisation, Sinha should look at data centre profiling tools and system assessment tools to identify and evaluate areas where energy efficiency measures can be introduced within the data centre. Usually utility bill information and system details like IT, HVAC etc, form the input to the profiling tools. The output would be an overall picture of energy utilisation efficiency rate and identification of potential areas where energy efficiency improvements can be done.
Some of the techniques that would be of interest to Sinha include:
1) As the servers and the related storage systems account for about 50 per cent of the power usage in a typical data centre, these are the logical areas to look for power saving opportunities. Introduce virtualisation techniques for IT system consolidation.
2) Reducing the storage footprint during storage virtualisation is critical. Any widely used operating systems will contain millions of duplicate data objects that are distributed, backed-up and archived. Thus, duplication of data can be avoided. The energy required to power the storage resources will be reduced proportionally. Snapshot, FlexVol and RAID-DP are some of the well-known tools that can do the job.
3) Using variable frequency drives on air handlers can save energy.
Second AnswerSome of the best practices that Sinha might consider adopting as part of green initiatives are as follows:
a) IT systems can be purchased from vendors who meet the EPA’s Energy Star guidelines
b) Systems can be set to hibernate mode when not in use
c) CRT monitors can be replaced with high efficiency LCD monitors
d) Create an infrastructure to encourage work from home to reduce power consumption.
With the ever-increasing power cost and availability of power, the RoI in implementing green IT over the next five to eight years will be justified.
Sanjeev Kumar, Group CIO & Group President, Business Excellence, Adhunik Group of Industries
First AnswerSome of the major challenges that IT managers face include new technologies, security threats and compliance requirements. Prateek Sinha needs to explore the cloud seriously and start moving some applications to it in order to reduce the captive data centre to minimum. If the data centre is running out of space, thermal footprint or energy usage in the data centre is increasing, Sinha should look at consolidation first. So, he should introduce virtualisation techniques for IT system consolidation. Fewer servers also translate into reduced cost for data centre space, and less for power and cooling.
Second AnswerThe mantra today is reduce, reuse and recycle, and at Adhunik, we have done this mainly by moving to the cloud. The cloud platform helps your business reduce the IT expenditure. Besides this, optimise and improve power and management strategies across the data centre and other areas within IT. This helps organisations consume less energy and align with a green strategy internally. Sinha should look at intelligent power consumption as roughly 60 per cent of all power consumed in traditional offices is associated with IT and computing. He can design a data centre that has the best technologies from an uptime perspective, which also reduces carbon footprints. He should also look at recycling of waste like desktops, old servers and other electronic items to reduce carbon footprint. In addition, alternative energy technologies such as photovoltaic, heat pumps, and passive cooling can all lead to a green environment and saves costs.