Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE BASICS OF GREEN COMPUTING
Green technologies is a term that some business leaders believe espouses a back-to-nature philosophy and denounces all industry. However a the reality is much more positive than that. Green Technologies is the reduced environmental impact from running an Information Technology (IT) department. Green is just another term for the efficient use of technologies. (In this case, we are referring primarily to electronic equipment.)
Efficient happens to also coincide with lowest cost and most environmentally friendly technologies.
“Green” technologies are nothing special. The key is to know what to look for. Equipment is considered green if it is efficient to operate and easy to dispose of at the end of its useful life. Green technologies save companies money, if viewed over their useful life. For example, an “80 Plus”
grade power supply in a desktop computer will save about $30 per year in reduced energy consumption over a “standard” desktop unit. However a there may be a one-time additional cost of about $20 at its purchase. In addition, a computer designed for easy material separation at disposal is cheaper to discard at the end of its useful life than one built using a higher level of toxic materials.
There are three primary characteristics of Green Technologies. One or more of these can apply to an IT device (computer, printer, monitor, keyboard a scanner, etc.):
▲ It must use energy efficiently. A piece of equipment with a given level of capabilities can be designed and assembled with an eye toward low purchase price, easy disposal, or energy efficient operation.
Unfortunately, many companies emphasize the initial purchase price and not the cost of running the equipment over its three or five year useful life. Therefore, most manufacturers focus on providing the lowest unit price.
▲ It uses the right size equipment for the job. Most people would not use a semitruck instead of an economy class car to drive back and forth to a distant grocery store. It would consume significantly more fuel to accomplish the same amount of work. (Ok, some people would drive the truck no matter what.) The same applies to IT systems. Often an oversized server is purchased to support an application either because it is the company standard or it was available when a server was needed. The larger device consumes more energy than a properly sized unit, yet provides the same amount of benefit to the company.
▲ It includes the cost for the proper disposal of unwanted equipment.
Disposal is something rarely considered during a purchase. After all, it is years away. Yet the cost to properly dispose of a device is part of the total cost of unit ownership. Companies may be liable for the cost of landfill cleanup for improper disposal of equipment.
If you want to wrap up the essential messages of this book, it is to use less energy and to properly dispose of old equipment. That’s it. Now you can close the book’s cover. You now know the “what.” However, if you want to know the “how to do this,” then you must read on.
The Energy Problem
If someone asked you the cost of providing electricity to your data center for a month, do you even know where to find the information? The primary cause of the electrical usage problem in a company is the disconnect between the people who are using electricity and the ones who are paying the bills. Employee behaviors are the result of a company’s reward system.
The people consuming this resource have little incentive to economize;
they simply assume it’s available. The people who are paying the bills lack the time or technical understanding to debate its appropriate level of use.
Electrical consumption is a combination of what we are operating and how we operate it. For efficient electrical usage, which devices should we buy? Imagine shopping for new computers that were plastered with stickers such as those found on a new refrigerator—stickers that proclaim the average amount of energy used by that device in a given year. With this information,
IT managers could make intelligent comparisons of the operational costs between devices with similar capabilities. That day has not yet arrived. Purchases are typically based on current company technical standards or lowest price. Energy consumption is not a determining factor.
Much of the electrical energy purchased by an IT organization is consumed by equipment sitting idle. Think not? When workers go home at night, the lights are turned off. Are all desktop PCs turned off as well? How about their monitors and printers? How much electricity is used while they sit around with no one to use them? Is this a wise use of a company’s scarce financial resources?
Think about the data center. Rows of servers, disk drives, tape backup systems all humming along all day, every day. For most companies, the daytime hours are used in on-line inquiries, while evening hours are used for batch processing. Yet only certain servers are engaged in all of the processing.
There could be long stretches of time when many others sit, slurping down electricity, generating heat that must be cooled. This continues hour after hour, kilowatt after kilowatt. We cannot flip computer switches on and off throughout the day. It takes time to start a computer and to warm up a laser printer. There is business value in having these tools always immediately available.
So what are the solutions? What are some practical actions to address these issues without hurting customer support?
Sometimes being green and saving energy go hand in hand. Have you ever replaced someone’s bulky desktop CRT monitor with an LCD monitor?
The LCD monitor’s smaller size frees desk space for other things, so people are very happy to make the switch. (The image displayed on LCD
monitors “appears” larger than it is, permitting the use of smaller screens.)
As a side note, you just reduced the company’s electrical expenses for that single device by two-thirds. The same goes with replacing desktop computers under a three-year refresh cycle. If the new machines are Energy
Star compliant, then they will provide greater performance (being three years more technically advanced than the unit they replaced), while using even less electricity. A component of Energy Star compliance is that the equipment is set to automatically “go to sleep” (a reduced power state where everything in memory is saved). Of course, if this function is disabled a then much of the Energy Star benefit is lost.
Think about Power in a Different Way
Think of energy like any other material used to make something, with a computer as the factory. Just as a factory uses metal, parts, or glue to create something, computers use energy to create, process, or store data. This data has value to the company, so electricity should be an identifiable component of the cost of goods sold. However, since the cost of electricity is spread like pennies across a wide range of uses, it appears to be too small to count. Further, the cost of collecting individual device usage statistics would be unwieldy and too expensive to be practical.
True, each individual cost is small, but the aggregate cost is high. The problem is the disconnection between the person using the material (electricity)
and the person paying the bill. When you shop for a new car, do you look at the vehicle’s miles per gallon rating, or just buy the one whose shape appeals to you the most? If costs are important to you—as they are in business—then the miles per gallon rating is a key factor. However, if the fuel is free, then the equipment’s efficiency becomes irrelevant to you.
So, idea number one is to begin thinking about electricity as a material that is consumed by the data center and the office desktop computers.
Electricity is essential to complete our daily work. Therefore, it is just the cost of doing business. This is true. However, the issue is not that electricity is used, but rather how much is wasted.
Think back to the factory example. What if your factory purchased raw materials to make a product for retail sale, and 75% of the purchased material was scrapped—thrown away unused? How long could your company afford this? That means three out of every four components purchased were waste? That is how much electricity a desktop computer that is left on all of the time wastes per year. Electricity cannot be stored. It is consumed by equipment and the wattmeter is running, but no useful work was done for the money. Are you concerned yet?
How about another example? Have you ever walked into an office that was packed tight with boxes of files? These containers full of paper took up floor space (figure what you pay per square foot), restricted work, and were a fire hazard. What if the paper is moved out, but the files still exist on data center disk drives. Because managers and clerks insist that these files must be instantly available online, these disk drives often sit untouched and spin and spin and spin around the clock, even on holidays.
In addition, they need to be cooled and, then, there is the expense of hardware maintenance. In addition, there are the back-up tapes created of the data on these storage drives. How much would you pay per year to store these files off-line for occasional use? Remember the disconnect between the people creating the equipment and the ones who pay the bills. The same holds true with the expense of backup media.
So, you see, there is more to Green Technologies than just flipping off the power switch. There may be significant opportunities for savings in an organization—without any impact on customer service. How can you resist such a promise! Again the topic is easy to understand—use less electricity.
But how!
