Late last year I had the opportunity to attend a Green IT conference at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, so-sponsored by the UN and AITGlobal. While references for the statistics bandied about were hard to come by - leaving me somewhat leary - several speakers had actually put into practice some of their "green" energy-saving recommendations. The speakers made the case - there's some real money at stake. So how real is it?

"Green IT" may seem a bit wishful or trendy, but I'll reflect back to a colloquium I attended in graduate school in the early '70s. A researcher from IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Labs gave a presentation on the relationship between thermodynamics and computing. He put forth an argument that a computer's energy consumption increases with the speed of computation. I was flabbergasted that it was true, that anyone would prove it, and that anyone but a theoretician would care. Yet today, any of us can go to our laptop's power setting and choose between performance and battery life.

About the "green IT" Conference, then.... Most of the presentations focused on energy savings and the carbon tax benefits that will presumably matter in the future. Less was said about environmental issues like the toxicity of irresponsible disposal. In all, three things struck me.

First, "green IT" is a collection of suggestions on how to save energy, hence money, but for the most part there's nothing "green" about the ideas. CIOs could simply pursue many of them, fighting for and justifying each one separately. But "green IT" is new packaging that emotionally justifies and motivates such work, and "green IT" makes for a nice umbrella - a strategic theme.

Second, "green IT" brings awareness that - if the energy cost isn't enough to concern us - there will be greater costs of ignoring this when the government levies a carbon tax.

Third, and I wish I didn't have to say this, once again I heard a smart group of IT wizzards holding an inward-focused conversation. It was almost all about cutting costs and all the cool things IT could do. Only one sentence uttered in the whole conference suggested how IT could help its company "go green" and profit from it. Admittedly, we should set our own example first, but, as I've said in other issues of this newsletter, let's not forget the business.

Real Ideas

So what can IT do in the name of "green"? Building to ideas of increasing complexity....

• Turn out the lights in the data center.
• Power down servers and desktops you don't need at night.
• Cool the data center racks, not the whole data center. Yahoo reduced its data center cooling costs by 21%. And see six quick tips on data center cooling.
• Turn up the temperature of your cooling. Look at the temperature ratings on the back of your equipment. None of it says it has to run at 65°. How about 85°? That's still below the 95°F max ambient temperature it says on my old Compaq Presario. (Your data center manager may have a different opinion about this.) If you want to do that and sleep knowing you're not going to fry your equipment, install temperature sensors in your racks, and make your cooling smarter. Off-the-shelf products exist.
• Upgrade to more energy-efficient machines, including desktops, and move to thin clients, which require less computational horsepower, less storage, less memory, and smaller power supplies.
• VMWare quotes server utilization rates at 5%-15%. So virtualize your servers, cutting down on physical server power consumption. Get higher utilization for the same electrical cost. (See also VMWare on energy efficiency through virtualization.)
• To make it easier to virtualize your servers, rethink your applications architecture. Shrink your portfolio.
• To rethink your architecture and cut data storage (and the energy required to run it), rationalize your data and clean it up. (This is something you always wanted to do anyway, but never could justify.)
• And finally, for something really radical, the last speaker offered some really interesting ideas. Bury your data center underground (saves heating and cooling) and cover it with wind-power generators. She believed it could pay for itself in one year.

Justifying this using today's costs requires simple calculations of electrical usage and rates. Justifying using tomorrow's costs requires a different calculus, one we're not too familiar with in the US. Carbon footprint. We talk about it, but what does it really mean? In essence, you have to calculate the amount of carbon your energy consumption pumps into the atmosphere, and you have to calculate the cost to you based on cap-and-trade prices, which we don't know yet.

So what was the one "green" idea that looked outside IT? Help your business go paperless.

Yet surely there are other ideas. How would the company "go green"? Heating and cooling management applications integrated with heating and cooling systems? Workforce scheduling that minimizes rush-hour commuting delays? ERP that chooses stock levels by optimizing low inventory cost and transportation energy?

Silliness

And now for the silliness that can give this bad press....

On the history of IT in the enterprise... "First, IT was focused inward. Next, IT had to become focused on the business mission. Now IT has to focus on the world." I don't buy this. The IT department is not running its own enterprise and setting its own goals independent of the company's board of directors. This "world view" of IT will add to the hype, leaving you at risk of losing budget when the next big thing comes along. The sensible idea: "Green IT" is part marketing and part cold business calculations. The former will be effective branding if you are a data center provider. The latter will have a much more lasting effect than the former inside a company.

SaaS. Oursourced data centers. Zero carbon. Not much different than the advertising message for the new Chevy Volt - "Emission Free!". That's putting on blinders. Those electrons in your battery didn't just arrive from the big bang. If and when cap-and-trade comes into being in the US, I would expect outsourced providers to bill for carbon effects, like the airlines adding fuel surcharges. The sensible idea: Your electrical bill will drop, and you will ultimately be responsible for consuming less energy because a managed datacenter can probably gain greater economies of scale in power usage than you can. But skip the hype.

Get a Jump Start

Notwithstanding the silly ideas and the inward focus, there's something real here. Many "green IT" ideas stand on their own two feet based on energy savings alone, carbon effects notwithstanding. And some "green IT" ideas, like buying renewable energy, cost money but buy brand image.

But to start somewhere, you may want to take the simple step of including a new business metric in your strategic reporting - IT energy consumption per head (or per revenue dollar, or....) - and you may even want to encourage your accounting department to separate IT energy costs from other energy costs. You may have to meter your power separately.

I suspect the biggest effects will arise from applying information technology that improves your company's carbon condition. That may not be possible until the cap-and-trade rules are in place, but some advanced thinking will help your company get a jump-start.

Steve