Environmental IT - is your IT Green?

View Comments and Questions (8)

What's Your Question � Ask Our Experts..

Chris Gabriel 's views on how the market is responding to Green IT? Do you agree with him or are your experiences different?

Everyone's talking about ‘green IT' - but are companies taking real action yet?

In their own way, everybody probably is, but the drive to approach IT is with green tinted glasses and is still too sporadic and uncoordinated. As with all ‘big initiatives', the reasons for adoption or not, vary in every organisation, but the green agenda moving to the boardroom is, as ever, having a positive impact on those in the business supply chain, and they are taking notice. As a result IT is becoming far more aware of the issue. Companies who are in the supply chain of a customer who has ‘gone green', are definitely on the environmental information gathering path, and we see legislation from government starting to permeate into public sector organisations, who are waking up to their responsibilities and in their eyes, more importantly, the government scorecard system. To coin a famous song, "Everybody's talking at them, and more are hearing the words they say."

If not, what is stopping them?

As with all big projects it varies, and the environmental agenda has had a rocky ride up until relatively recently. Perhaps IT people are less prone to hype, and focussed more on hard technical evidence, and therefore their natural bias is to have been slower on the softer side of becoming greener than their colleagues in the boardroom, or marketing department have? More probably, simply, the IT department has not had to pay the energy bill up until now. Green is simply about cost and efficiency, and if you think energy is free then perhaps you do not concentrate on how much juice your servers are using. As facilities people start to break up the energy bill and the business starts to look where all the power goes, IT come into the spotlight and the eyes open and the lights go on.

Which areas of IT are the worst culprits in terms of environmental impact? Which are the easiest to tackle?

Servers, and Servers. Processing is our big culprit and one of the easiest to fix. Actually, storage is our biggest issue, but it is the most difficult to fix, so it is always good to start with a quick win. We have too many servers running too few applications, at too little efficiency. It really is that simple. Who would buy an energy efficient fridge, turn it on full cool, and then stick one bottle of milk in it for the next 5 years, on the off chance you might buy some cheese or a chicken? Let us be quite clear - the hidden loaded cost of IT is power. If you choose to buy a chest freezer and throw a fish finger in it then somebody is going to come and ask you why, so tackling server inefficiency first, through virtualisation, is the most sensible place to start, and the quickest likely win. The elephant in the room however is storage. Working out why we store so much rubbish for so long, is a question I think most businesses will be asking themselves over the coming years. Unfortunately, this blog is another site with information that people might not read but that needs power and cooling to keep it running. It's probably self evident why I don't continue....

How do you expect environmental impact to influence future IT spending patterns?

EFFICIENCY

What are the potential business benefits of reducing the carbon footprint generated by a company's IT operations?

Simply cost. I have not come across one green IT initiative that has not been good for the bottom line, delivered IT faster or more efficiently, made a company more agile and able to deliver faster services. Green is good. As I said in an article last year, "Its not naïve to be green."

How long before green IT becomes a compliance issue?

Yesterday. Count the minutes. The PS (Public Sector) will already have to publish their buildings carbon footprint. A board of directors already have the single responsibility to deliver best shareholder value. Is being environmentally reckless good for shareholder value? No, so efficient IT, and its not difficult to achieve, is surely a compliance responsibility already.

What is Logicalis doing to reduce its own environmental impact?

We are 14001 certified, but trying to do more to make the certificate a real benefit. We have a very high percentage of home working contracts (well over 50%) so we try to take our people off the roads if we can. We have video conferencing in all our offices, and we use Unified Communications to allow people to work from home and still be part of the bigger picture. We are training our customers on the environment, and will fund £50,000 worth of Green IT research this year with Global Action Plan (an independent environmental charity). Can we do more...of course, but we try to walk the walk as much as we can.

Green IT - What do you think?

Your Comments and Questions

chris gabriel, about 1 year ago

Re-use is starting to improve. Forrester's CIO conference this year had a re-use charity booth and it got a good amount of traffic. We have been profligate in our deployment of technology and it would be remove this from circulation asap. However, is the disposal of an older inefficient server better for the environment than its re-use for the next 5 years?

Mandy Shaw, about 1 year ago

In response to Victoria's question, I am sure the answer is 'not enough'. One reason for this is the increasing maintenance and support costs associated with old or non-standard equipment, but, frequently, the old equipment is just not much use. Low secondhand values, and the awkwardness of transferring software licences from one organisation to another, can make equipment difficult to sell on or donate. So it is often simply disposed of, effectively as one level above scrap.

Victoria Furness, about 1 year ago

The 'green' mantra is 'reduce, reuse and recycle', but too much emphasis is put on the latter 'recycle' element in my opinion, when little steps in the 'reduce' and 'reuse' phases could reap more long-term environmental benefits. I can see how server virtualisation is a good way of tackling the 'reduce' element but how much 'reuse' of IT equipment or components occurs in the workplace?

chris gabriel, about 1 year ago

George, I am looking for a new house at the moment and visited one with 5 kids in 6 bedrooms. Every room had a PC, high res monitor, sound systems etc. Add in the effect of consumer home equipment and your talking a much bigger number. ps. anybody selling their home and doing a home information pack might want to think about leaving their PC's on all night, as their energy consumption figures are going to look extremely high. Imagine this 6 bedroom house running at least 5 PCs day and night -- their primary home energy use isn't for heating its for fighting aliens.

George Black, about 1 year ago

I've just read some statistics from The Carbon Trust, which suggest that office IT equipment (servers, desktop PCs, monitors, printers, photocopiers etc) accounts for around 15% of the UK’s total energy consumption, and this figure is expected to rise to 30% by 2020!

chris gabriel, about 1 year ago

Quick wins are always good, but, as you say, it is the strategic longer terms strategies that create real improvements and change. I have a list of my top 10 environmental programs, and I have to say the elephant in the room is Information Life Cycle Management. Desktop power management is on my list definitely. Some of my thoughts are obviously environmental and some might seem a little spurious, but I think they all have merit. 1. Processor (Server) Virtualisation 2. Storage Virtualisation 3. Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) 4. Application Consolidation 5. Desktop Power Management 6. DC Appliance Consolidation 7. Branch / Remote Office Consolidation 8. Unified Communications and Video Collaboration 9. Shared Service Buildings 10. Digital Forms I think the first 5 are the big environmental strategies, and as I think I said before, there is no such thing as Green IT, its Efficient IT = and driving efficiency across this areas are the big but long term wins.

Gary Eastwood, about 1 year ago

Interesting piece, Chris. You talk about the 'quick wins' of server virtualisation, but what impact can simple policy-based guidelines - such as switching off PCs and sharing desktop printers - also have on the overall power consumption of the IT department?

Edward Charvet, about 1 year ago

We loved this piece. Once again Chris gives his unique perspective on this huge issue and gets to the heart of some of the tensions around the subject. Can anyone give us examples of Green led initiatives that deliver bottom line returns?