According to Computerworld, PricewaterCoopers have chopped the carbon footprint by 20 percent in two years. Its new data center in Georgia has made a significant contribution by reducing the power consumption by 20 million kilowatt-hours and cutting operational costs by $2 Million, a 40 percent savings. The firm realized those savings by virtualizing 2,500 servers, using more-efficient equipment and moving to an optimized hot-aisle/cold-aisle design. SILICONINDIA

In a survey of C-level executives, IDC found that Green IT and sustainability was rated second among their priorities for 2011. Phillip Carter of IDC said “What I think is good is that two or three years ago, there was a lot of hype around green IT and sustainability, so now these CIOs that we speak to are seeing through some of that and the green washing has gone away.” FORMTEK

The first wave of green IT covers data center consolidation and consequent increases in energy efficiency besides an analysis of the way business communication is done within and outside the organization, its paper usage policy, its technology waste, business processes, non-data center energy usage, applications and end-user computing. However, the bigger goal is sustainability, something that C-level executives are increasingly getting concerned with, perhaps egged on by new regulations. And that is why the next wave of green IT focuses on IT’s ability to drive sustainability and develop a coordinated sustainability information framework.

So what makes for an efficient information framework? A coordinated and efficient information framework for corporate sustainability should include the capability to analyze data and synthesize information in a variety of forms required by different departments within an organization. For example, what a CEO needs to know may be very different from what a CFO requires. While a CEO may need immediate answers for a shareholders’ meet or a meeting with government regulators, a CFO may need to know the financial impact of sustainability initiatives. Again, a CIO may want to know how much energy the IT department consumes every month.

The sustainability consulting services market is expected to reach $9.6 billion by 2015. While only 26% of organizations earmark a budget for green IT, Forrester finds that adoption of green IT is much higher, approaching 70% in areas of the data center and distributed IT.

In 1992, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency launched Energy Star, a voluntary label designed to promote and recognize energy-efficient technologies. The term ‘Green Computing’ has its origins here. In 2006, this program was revised to include stricter efficiency requirements along with a tier ranking system for approved products.

The environmental impact of information technology has led to major IT firms encouraging responsible usage of computer resources to minimize impact on the environment and enhance opportunities of potential energy savings. To take a 360-degree view of green computing, experts advocate: green use, green disposal, green design and green manufacturing.

‘Green use’ entails reduction of energy consumption of technologies while ‘green disposal’ involve restoring and reusing old computers and electronic equipment. Designing energy- efficient and environmentally sound IT products is called ‘green designing’. And finally, green manufacturing involves creating IT systems and subsystems that have minimal or no impact on the environment. Companies such as AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and others encourage green computing with their products, applications, services and practises.

Seventy per cent of the PC manufacturing process involves using natural resources. The best way to prevent depletion of natural resources is therefore to increase the life cycle of a PC. Thus green computing concentrates on product longevity and includes both upgradability and modularity. Software and hardware optimization such as algorithmic efficiency, virtualization, terminal servers, power management, power supply, monitor display, etc., contribute to eco-friendly computer resources.

Green computing initiatives like telecommunication and telepresence are being implemented by companies as they reduce air travel, cut down greenhouse gas emissions and increase profit margins.

While centralizing IT management and consolidating services, operations, resources, infrastructure, and data centers was the top priority in the strategies category, enabling technologies for fulfilling this goal — virtualization of various IT components – is the top priority in the technologies category. The results of this survey are similar to the one conducted earlier this year. That survey, sponsored by NASCIO, TechAmerica, and Grant Thornton, also found that consolidation of IT resources and energy-efficiency and savings measures were priorities for state CIOs.

Implementing technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing are increasingly topping the
agenda of CIOs as they look to reduce the power bills for their data centers and ensure a carbon neutral status for their organizations. In fact, a survey by Forrester Research in 2007 had indicated that nearly 60% of IT managers cite operational efficiency as the prime reason behind data center consolidation.

Other reasons include reducing real estate costs, reducing total cost of ownership and reducing cooling costs. What all these boil down to is a desire to make data centers more cost-efficient and able to contribute more directly to a firm’s bottom line. Given the high operating costs of a data center, the fewer centers an enterprise has, the less expensive it is to run that enterprise, even when the cost of super sizing a consolidated center is included. Hence the rush for data center consolidation.

Survey report is available here (PDF)

According to a McKinsey study, typically data centers utilize only 6% of its servers and only 50% of its facilities. This can be changed drastically if IT mangers and facility managers come together. First, the joint IT/facilities team must collect as much information as possible on how much energy the organization is currently using, where it is being used, and for what purpose. Here, it is important to remember that the power coming into a data center is not the same as the power being used by the equipment. By measuring every step that the power takes along the way to the equipment, whether it’s through the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or the power distribution system, the IT/facilities team can identify what needs to be fixed and can be fixed.

Next, the team has to analyze the data collected to come up with a prognosis — find workable remedies for saving power, lowering risk or freeing up capacity. The key questions to be answered here are – which are the areas consuming maximum power, what are the costs associated with each area in a data center, and are there any significant trends. Tracking idle periods and usage patterns are essential.

Finally comes action — mobilizing, planning and acting on energy saving measures. Once IT managers along with facility managers have identified the fault centers, and designed strategies to tackle them, it’s time to implement the new policies by consolidating equipment using techniques such as virtualization, and by rescheduling jobs to run more efficiently.

Several studies have revealed that data centers account for up to 50% of the energy used in commercial buildings and consume 10 times more energy per square foot than the rest of the building. Typically, facility management teams have approached these IT energy demands as unavoidable operating costs, which cannot be reduced. While facility management teams, and sometimes even the IT management teams, would like to treat IT systems as a black box that consumes power at an uniform rate, this is not true as advances in virtualization and cloud computing have shown.

Facility management teams need to acknowledge this and look for solutions in tandem with IT managers. During periods of low utilization, applications can be moved –physically and virtually — to a corner of the data center, shutting down parts of the server and storage pools that are not in use. Now, only the segment using the applications needs to be cooled. Joint management can make this happen, and this is just one of the many improvements possible in today’s data centers. But for this, facility managers have to jointly work with IT managers to put in place a system that ensures a dialogue around effective energy efficiency strategies. And for facility managers to implement an effective green building strategy, IT departments need management and measurement tools — data center energy management software — capable of helping them identify which actions will have the biggest impact in using power more efficiently.

Why Sustainability is IT’s Next Big Thing
Sustainable IT: Saving Money and TCO Through Green IT
Compliance and TCO: Using Data Archiving to Support an End-to-End ILM Strategy
SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe: Enhancements and New Developments
SAP BusinessObjects GRC Access Control 5.3 Risk Analysis and Remediation’s Rule Architect
Sustainable Compliance: Getting There from Here SAP Mentor Session
Sustainability and TCO: Cut Energy Expenditure by Shutting Down Inefficient Legacy Systems

Also on DemoPod, there is a session on Leveraging SAP to Address Green IT. Like everywhere else, Twitter is there for everybody to follow conference proceedings. Hashtag is #Sapteched

Modern IT systems have been responsible for increased energy consumption and cost of energy as a rising proportion of IT costs. Data centers are generally perceived as the biggest culprits as they consume more energy per square foot than any other part of an office building. But in reality, they are only part of an information and services supply chain which increasingly gobbles up energy and spews greenhouse gases at every point on the way, thus raising overall energy expenses for IT. According to IT research firm Gartner, data center power, cooling and energy supply issues will worsen in the next few years as organizations amass technology infrastructure which puts energy-related costs at 12% of overall data center expenditure. But as data center energy costs become more visible, the financial benefits of moving to green computing are increasingly being recognized.

In the last two decades, the IT industry has seen a concentration on processing power and storage capacity, while power consumption has been largely ignored. That is now changing, as CIOs and IT managers look for actionable energy saving ideas. Green computing now has a major emphasis at IT firms, as they look for more sustainable IT systems. Technology changes such as virtualization are also making the conversion easier.

- Recently concluded DataWorld conference effectively replaced Green IT with Energy Efficiency. All about cost savings!

- Green Grid – companies are working to develop metric to measure datacenter efficiency. Green Grid developed two metrics – One for facilities (the PuE – Power usage effectiveness – and DCiE -datacentr infrastructure efficiency) and the other for the IT. This is DCP – data center productivity. (The Green Grid is a global consortium of companies dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and computing ecosystems)

- Forrestor online tool for energy efficiency modeling. Also new tool for calculating online energy savings – NightWatchman

- IDC Directions Conference relegates Green IT to the corner and favors new favorites – Cloud Computing and Virtualization.