If the low hanging energy-reduction fruit seems pretty well picked over, it may be time to wander back into the building’s data center, with its whirring disk drives and purring fans. There, sitting rackmounted in plain sight, the station storage system may be a candidate for that next green initiative. TVTECHNOLOGY

That should make a lot of small companies in India sit up and take note of the benefits of switching to cloud computing. Already, more than 50 cloud computing service providers are working in the Indian market. Indian internet services providers (ISPs) and data centre service providers such as Bharti Airtel, Sify, Trimax and NetMagic are investing in bandwidth and facilities to support new cloud service offerings.

Again, the biggies of Indian IT like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, HCL, Mahindra Satyam and others are developing cloud computing applications and solutions for verticals ranging from financial services and banking to manufacturing. “Cloud computing has opened new avenues for the industry to evolve and experiment. Being a low cost, highly efficient and extremely flexible application, it has provided the relatively smaller companies to move to the scale and robustness of larger companies. As the industry is dealing with supply constraints, the shift towards the paradigm of ‘Cloud’ is apparent and vital,” Infosys Technologies CEO and managing director K Gopalakrishnan commented recently at the All India Management Association conference.

CA Technologies,
CarbonSystems,
Enablon,
Enviance,
Hara,
IHS,
ProcessMAP,
SAP,
TRIRIGA and
Verisae.

We will covering some of these companies in near future. Do share your experience if you are using them.

It’s not a secret that small business owners are part of key community targeted by Microsoft. Study found that cloud computing has biggest impact on small businesses which rely mostly on email, content sharing and CRM. Small business owners achieved far more energy efficiency ( nearly 90%) compared to large organizations (~30%).

You can read this study in this PDF file. It definitely shows how Microsoft intends to use green computing in selling cloud computing solutions.

WSP developed a framework methodology aligned to the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI) and carried out modeling to compare the energy use and carbon emissions per user for Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint server 2007 and Dynamics CRM with their cloud-based equivalents: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Dynamics CRM Online. The results suggest that for widely deployed and commonly used applications such as email, content sharing and customer relationship management, the cloud can enable significant reduction in carbon emissions.

Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist with Microsoft said: “The benefits of cloud computing are clear: increased productivity, reduced costs, and lower management overhead of products. Now add environmental benefits as Microsoft’s cloud can help reduce energy use and carbon emissions by at least 30% per user. The cloud has the ability to deliver business value for customers in an age where corporate responsibility is critical to business success.”

“This study provides a hard hitting, quantitative and measurable analysis of the impact that cloud computing can have directly compared to traditional deployment of IT within a company” said Josh Whitney, Corporate Sustainability Lead with WSP Environment & Energy.

“Essentially what you have happening is similar to driving private automobiles versus riding on public transportation,” said Josh Whitney. “Everyone driving cars on the highway is similar to the inefficiency of an on-premise environment as opposed to taking mass transit, which is effectively the public cloud. However, unlike mass transit, there aren’t any tradeoffs for using the cloud.”

This strategy will work very well in European markets which are sensitive to sustainable computing practices.

More effective methods to trim energy consumption are needed and it begins with managing power distribution. A variety of data center energy management software is available today to monitor, control, and regulate power distribution and usage with the end objective of reducing energy usage in a data center. By using sophisticated management software, data center managers can provide just the right amount of energy to each computing task, and no more.

If a rack of servers doesn’t need to be on, then they shouldn’t be on. If another rack of servers needs to work extra hard, then it should get the power it needs to do its job. But once its job is done, the energy should be turned down accordingly. This is what the energy management software helps make possible by tracking power usage for each server in a data center and then supplying it accordingly. And based on this, others factors such as heat gain and cooling requirements of data centers can be calculated thus allowing the data centre manager to accurately allocate power based on actual runtime data. Information thus gathered becomes the foundation for developing an energy management system through which energy usage can be controlled. In addition, efficient energy management gives the IT manager the ability to track and verify energy savings to qualify for potential rebates and incentives or verify regulatory carbon reductions.

Since datacenters are the integral part of any organisation so it needs the most attention. Viridity maintains an equilibrium  between power, utilization and cooling to increase the life of datacenter and hence it works more , is more reliable , more responsive and all of it comes with a reduced cost.

Few of the benefits of the Company are:

• It is completely transparent towards the stepwise action plans.
• Datacenter life cycle is increased by 2-3 years.
• Improved services such as reliability, responsiveness and efficiency.
• Reduction in the cost of power and cooling.
• Staff productivity is enhanced by letting the less skilled employees do the  everyday(less important) job.

Viridity is a software start-up which is growing very fast and will soon be a leading company in managing datacenters in a greener way.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc. owns, acquires and manages technology related real estate. The company focuses on providing Powered Base Buildings. Over 50 Fortune 500 companies rely on it to provide solutions for their data center requirements. Due to many benefits of turning a building green, Digital Realty Trust on March, 31, 2009 adopted the newly announced BREEAM(Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) standards.

Jim Smith, Chief Technology Officer for Digital Realty Trust, said, “Adopting the BREEAM standards right at the beginning of the initial design stages will not only build in reduced running costs because the building’s insulation and cooling will be optimised, but in the longer term the value of the building can be expected to be higher than a comparable building which is not BREEAM accredited”.

BREEAM provides to its clients, developers, designers and others with market recognition, assurance of best environmental practice incorporated into a building, a benchmark that is higher than regulation, a tool to help reduce running costs, improve working and living environments and a standard that demonstrates progress towards corporate and organisational environmental objectives.It addresses wide-ranging environmental and sustainability issues and uses a scoring system which is transparent, easy to understand. It also maintains a robust technical standard with rigorous quality assurance and certification.

According to Paul Gibbon, Director of Sustainability, BRE Global “The advantage of scheme development using the framework of BREEAM Bespoke is that it reduces the cost of assessments and provides a ready made set of criteria against which developers, designers and clients can assess their buildings”.

Early BREEAM assessment standards for datacentres were carried out as part of Digital Realty Trust developing a facility for a major financial institute which was completed late in 2008 which achieved an Excellent rating. The datacentre uses a unique heat recovery system which results in energy savings of up to 83 percent compared to conventional gas fired boilers. It also uses a building automation system which responds to changing atmospheric conditions making the most of when the ambient temperature is low.

IBM runs the world’s largest commercial technology infrastructure, with more than 8 million-square feet of data centers in six continents to its name, so if it implements its Green Initiatives in a  planned manner ,it surely will assuage the carbon footprints in  large extents and as a matter of fact it has pretty much succeeded in that.

IBM signed a $3.1 million deal to implement green technologies for Indian financial services company Religare Enterprises Limited. Under the contract, IBM will design, build, and maintain energy-efficient data centers in Delhi, Noida, and Mumbai for REL. It will also deploy networking gear and disaster-recovery systems for the company. The setup, which combines high-density computing with precision air conditioning controls, will cut REL’s energy costs by up to 35% by reducing annual power consumption by 3,600 kilowatt-hours, according to IBM.

IBM to date has built more than 300,000 square feet of raised data center space in India. The company has more than 50,000 employees in the country. The Project Big Green which was launched in 2007 and has outlined a five-step approach to improving energy efficiency is aimed at building and redesigning data centers that consume less energy. The initiative includes a new global “green team” of more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM. It has helped more that 2,000 clients develop greener data centers with average energy saving or more than 40 percent and increased the utilization of systems by an average two to four times. Additionally, IBM has recycled more than 1.5 billion pounds of IT equipment since 1996. Also, since from 1990 to 2007 IBM has avoided energy-use-CO2 emissions equivalent to 45 percent of the companies 1990 energy use, saving more than $18 million annually, or more than $310 million in total.With the launch of its second phase of the project, the team from IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) is now targeting large corporate customers in India.

Here is the Lesson that can be learnt FROM IBM’s green Initiatives

and

A CIO’s Guide to Going Green

Watch it:

Takeaway for executives is to emphasize common sense. Save power, do power intensive operations at the right time. Common sense will drive Green IT revolution.

An enterprise must look at all the aspects of the environmental impact instead of focusing only on the most obvious ones. Therefore, planning and implementing the initiative in a phased manner is the secret to energy efficient and clean IT.

Industry bits: IBM ad claims 40% energy cost reduction by migrating to Green IT practices. Are you convinced with that claim?