The Positive Role IT Can Play in the Greening of Business

• The office is IT’s wild frontier where power usage is out of control
  PCs, printers, branch office servers, IP phones etc. are all deployed in hard to regulate and manage office spaces. But much of this infrastructure could be consolidated into data centres
• The data centre is an easier environment to control and monitor
  Much can be done to reduce power usage in data centres, but it may be justifiable to increase this by consolidating as much IT infrastructure from those hard to tame office spaces in to the data centres where it can be better managed
• Where consolidation into the data centres is not possible, standardization and remote management can be used to minimise the impact of office based IT equipment
  Thin client computing means less PCs deployed in offices and consolidating branch office servers into the data centres can actually reduce network traffic. But printers, phones and other peripherals needs to be near users, applying green standards and remote power management can reduce their energy usage
• Relying more on data centres means data centres need to be even more reliable
  IT resources being unavailable is less and less acceptable to any business and consolidating into data centres can lead to single points of failure. The risk of data centre outage can be mitigated if good management tools and procedures are in place
• IT has plenty to give back in the overall greening of business
  It is not just the hot air produced by data centres that can be harnessed. Collaborative applications can help reduce travel, business processes driven by IT can make supply chains more efficient and intelligent building management can save on other energy costs
• However, any claims that IT is actually helping to reduce a business’s carbon foot print need to be substantiated
  It is not enough to make vague claims, they must back backed with measurable and auditable facts, such as real decreases in executive air travel, employee mileage claims and office heating bills

 

The skeptic’s view of business, IT and the environment
As one business after another claims it has achieved carbon neutrality, there is increasing skepticism among the general public as many of these claims are underpinned by investment in tenuous carbon off-set schemes.
The information technology (IT) industry stands nervously by, knowing that its products are responsible for a growing slice of energy consumption in many businesses. Keen to avoid flak, IT vendors are making a big effort to reduce the power consumption of their products.
This is a good thing, but can a more positive view of IT be established? Can IT actually make a positive contribution to a business’s overall carbon neutrality or even be a carbon neutral activity in its own right? And let’s not forget that greening IT is also about reducing cost, which is as good a reason as any for businesses to take action.
This report looks at some of the more positive views that can be taken of IT in general and data centres, in particular by businesses when considering their environment messages.

The “office-IT factor”
Discussion around IT and the environment usually focuses around the power house of the whole operation – the data centre. The data centre’s greed for power is obvious. Just peering through a glass panel into one of these palaces of IT shows the bewildering range of devices required to deliver the core resources for a 21st century business’s IT requirements. Go through the door into the cool interior and you are reminded that it is not just the power to keep these devices running, but also the power required to stop them overheating – some estimates suggest that as much as two-thirds of the power consumed by data centres is used for cooling.
However, measure the energy a business uses to power its total IT usage and the data centre starts to look a little more modest in its requirements.
The ratio of overall power consumption by IT to that used just in data centres (let’s call it the “office-IT factor”) in any given business will vary greatly, but for many an audit of total IT power usage will likely show that the priority for
greening IT needs to start outside and not within the data centre.