Going Green

Green is the color of IT nowadays. We take a look at how enterprises can reduce their carbon footprint. By Manjari Juneja

Corporate India is warming up to green technologies for business competitiveness and cost efficiency. Companies need to incorporate the latest technologies available across IT hardware and other segments to reduce their carbon footprint and go the green way. Though this transformation is primarily driven by cost reduction needs in all segments, nevertheless an increasing number of companies and consumers alike are looking for products that consume less power and are easy to recycle. In the process of ushering in a green revolution within their system they not only boost productivity but also help build a case of being responsible to the environment and promoting sustainable growth.

From a computing perspective, modern IT systems, apart from being complex and sophisticated, are energy-guzzlers. The more powerful the system, the more watts it needs to be up and running. It also has to be supported by elaborate cooling systems, to remove the heat generated by processors, as otherwise excess heat could lead to malfunctions. According to statistics, every watt required for compute power creates the need for another watt for cooling! So, apart from the environmental impact, enterprises have another issue to think of namely hefty electric bills! All these reasons make it amply clear why enterprises need to reduce their energy footprint and why they need a systematic green computing initiative, capable of addressing increasingly sophisticated problems.

Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, Citrix, India Subcontinent, said, “Going green has become a necessity, not an option, for companies facing the new reality of balancing business objectives with dwindling environmental resources. Limited energy supply and skyrocketing costs are compelling organizations to take radical measures to reduce their carbon footprint. IT is perhaps taking the biggest hit, with energy consumption in data centers reaching all time highs and with proliferating computer hardware fated to become electronic waste (e-waste).”

According to the India findings of the Symantec Worldwide 2009 Green IT Report survey data, senior-level IT executives in India report significant interest in green IT strategies and solutions, attributed to both cost reduction and environmental responsibility. The data points to a shift from implementing ‘green’ technologies primarily for cost reduction to a more balanced awareness of also improving an organization’s environmental standing.

S. Ramadorai, Founder and CTO, CMS Info Systems, said, “Emerging technologies such as virtualization and data center transformation, green data center, BMS along with energy-efficient equipment including computing devices, microprocessors, displays, fully recyclable e-material etc will drive the majority of IT investments in the next decade. Going green is not a choice anymore, it is a responsibility that all of us must share towards our customers, economy and our future generations.”

Govindan Ramanujam, Managing Director, BenQ India, added, “Green technology aims at creating environmentally conscious digital lifestyle devices that achieve business objectives and CSR. Since 2008, we have been formulating green product guidelines. It means offering digital lifestyle devices and focusing on efficiency.”

Reducing the carbon footprint

While there are different solutions for different problems, from a computing perspective, reducing the ecological footprint of a company’s IT assets has become a primary concern. There are multiple actions being taken by companies across the world. Carbon is generated wherever power is consumed—by major data centers, IT Infrastructures around the world, the number of flights taken by employees, the rent-a-car emission levels etc. Some organizations are enforcing strict emission norms for company hired vehicles. Companies can start tracking their carbon footprint and invest in energy-efficient technology, energy-saving measures and offer responsible product lifecycle management. There are many ways in which companies can render their support and work in collaboration with various environmental bodies to reduce their carbon footprint.

Diptarup Chakroborti, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, said, “The IT industry produces six percent of the global carbon footprint. Processors, networking, data centers etc. consume a lot of power. Companies can leverage several key initiatives such as telecommuting and telepresence, server & storage virtualization, procurement of environmentally friendly PCs and servers, PC power management, optimization of energy consumption in data centers and responsible management of e-waste.”

Sachdev Ramakrishna, Director - Marketing, Steria India, said, “Becoming a carbon neutral company is not an easy task; it involves investing in projects that nullify the effect of the carbon emissions generated due to the nature of a company's business. Corporations the world over are giving due importance to the environment (or sustainability as a whole) and this is the reason that green/environment or sustainability finds a place as an essential component of all corporate strategies today.”

Companies increasingly view ICT as a tool to both address business challenges and show their commitment to environmental issues. 53% of companies recently surveyed for Meetings around the World II—a Frost & Sullivan research study, commissioned by Verizon and Cisco—listed carbon footprint reduction and other environmental concerns as important considerations in determining the technology requirements. 61% of IT business managers and IT decision makers believed that collaboration technologies would reduce the need for business travel and 54% saw virtual meetings as an effective tool to build and maintain strong business relationships.

Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions, Verizon Business, India, said, “Innovative data centers use techniques to lessen the impact of their energy use, including the simple act of turning off unused servers. The easiest power to save is the power that isn’t used. With sophisticated operating processes, servers and disk drives can be powered down when not needed, then brought back online whenever demands require it. During low points in activity, organizations can run their servers at reduced speed, which lessens their energy consumption. In addition, an enterprise should consider deploying servers with the best power supply efficiency available with a selected configuration. Data center managers can improve the efficiency of their facilities by rigorous maintenance to keep equipment operating efficiently, as well as by modifying the layout and configuration of equipment to reduce cooling requirements. These and many more steps will increase overall data center efficiency and help lower the carbon footprint.”

Increasing product longevity

Product longevity plays an important role in all the stages of the life of a product—right from design to the end-of-life phase. The longer a product is in use, the fewer the numbers of that particular product that need to be created as well as disposed of.

As natural resources are already limited and fast depleting, it is imperative for companies to develop and create products which possess higher longevity in their green initiatives in order to ensure sustainability in the long run. Product longevity helps in ensuring the intelligent utilization of resources in the manufacturing of products and solutions. E-waste is a growing global issue as millions of computers are discarded into landfills and many raw materials used in their manufacture like lead, cadmium, mercury and chromium are harmful if they seep into the soil and groundwater. Therefore, a well made product would last longer than a less durable one that needs to be replaced sooner.

Unnikrishnan Nair, Senior Director, Indian subcontinent cluster, IT applications, Philips Innovation Campus, said, “Almost all of the products that are used in the electronics industry contain hazardous waste. At the same time, market pressures force companies to innovate and frequently bring in newer versions of existing products or completely new ones. This, in the end, results in higher levels of toxic waste in the environment. Companies are realizing the impact of this on the environment and are taking measures to minimize it. One of the ways is to start measuring the ‘reusable’ components in a product. The higher the percentage, the more eco-friendly the product becomes. This is a good competitive advantage these days.”

Gartner maintains that the PC manufacturing process accounts for 70% of the natural resources used during a PC’s lifecycle. Therefore, the biggest contribution to green computing usually is to prolong the equipment's lifetime. Another report from Gartner recommends to ‘Look for product longevity, including upgradability and modularity.’ For instance, manufacturing a new PC makes for a far bigger ecological footprint than manufacturing a RAM module to upgrade an existing one (lack of RAM is a common bottleneck for a middle aged PC because of software bloat; the software tends to get bigger and bigger). This is true both for energy use, emission of greenhouse gases, and toxic materials (such as brominated flame retardants). Product longevity is important in green computing as it will reduce the carbon footprint in the production process, usage of raw materials, waste during manufacturing and disposal as well as post production energy usage.

Vikas Bansal, Director - Carrier Business (India and South Asia), Cable&Wireless Worldwide, said, “The biggest contribution to green computing would be to prolong the equipment's lifetime. Product longevity is an important tool to maximize energy-efficiency enabling upgradability and modularity of products. This helps to balance the ecological footprint rather than manufacturing and replacing products to meet current needs. It is also important to help educate the market about energy-efficiency and to adopt standardized measurements. ICT suppliers need to be able to speak a common language with standard metrics. If product longevity is adhered to, it will help in conserving energy and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, and toxins into the environment.”

Subhashini Prabhakar, Chief Technology Manager, Dax Networks, said, “The biggest contribution to green computing is to prolong the equipment's lifetime. It is vital to look for product longevity, including upgradability and modularity.”

Going virtual

Computer virtualization refers to the abstraction of computer resources, such as the process of running two or more logical computer systems on one set of physical hardware. With virtualization, a system administrator could combine several physical systems into virtual machines on a single, powerful system, thereby unplugging the original hardware and reducing power and cooling consumption. Several commercial companies and open-source projects now offer software packages to enable a transition to virtual computing.

Nagaraj Bhat, Director, Global Information Services, Applied Materials India, said, “Virtualization is often considered ahead of the rest of the initiatives under the Green IT strategy due to the quick ROI and business benefits derived through a virtualization initiative. It offers many business benefits, cost-effectiveness and improved time to deployment. Virtual servers have proven to be cost effective in development, testing and staging environments and they can be deployed much faster than new physical machines. Many production applications and services such as print services, floating license servers, intranet portals and mid-tier applications can be moved easily into the virtualized environment. IT managers are increasingly considering virtual servers for high availability environments to deliver world-class server uptime at a low cost as part of the disaster recovery planning process.”

Virtualization helps in consolidating service requirements in the most efficient fashion. In the past, each enterprise had its own secure, dedicated data centers. Virtualization makes it possible for data center service providers to offer services at various quality levels in a better, cheaper and efficient manner. Consolidation optimizes space, air conditioning, cabling and lighting.

Puneet Datta, Assistant Director - Marketing, Canon India, commented, “The ability to reduce capital costs by increasing energy efficiency and requiring less hardware is the advantage of virtualization. It is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. Canon has a strong focus on providing technology and support services for virtualization which eventually leads to energy savings. 60% of Canon’s energy has been saved using virtualization though we believe that we are still at a nascent stage.”

Diwakar Nigam, MD, Newgen Software, said, “The concept of virtualization states that work will continue in the same fashion but that there will be reduction and virtualization of tangible documents. Their virtual or intangible versions can be stored, retrieved and accessed from anywhere at anytime. So, in a way, the carrying load of documents/papers will be reduced drastically when they will be stored on servers and be accessible from anywhere in the world. Those documents can also be modified at any point of time. Virtualization also helps in reducing paper wastage by creating and storing the documents in image form and accessing them directly from a central server.”

Power management tools

Energy conservation or power management has been a critical issue for technology companies over the last few years. It is more important for companies that manufacture machines that we use every day, especially portable electronic devices that can drain a battery quickly. Power management is one of the topical technical issues that manufacturers and designers face. The solution is to make the product work smarter. For example, power management helps extend battery life, thereby allowing longer use of a device between charges.

P. K. Saji, Senior Vice President (Global Infrastructure Operations), Sify Technologies Ltd., said, “There are various efficiency trackers being discussed. Green GRID’s PUE being the most popular one. McKinsey’s CADE (Corporate Average Data Center Efficiency) and Uptime Institute’s SAVE (Site Analytics to Validate Efficiency) are some of the metrics that have emerged for measuring data center efficiency. Tracking PUE (Power Usage Efficiency) which gives a measurement of power usage for IT load compared to the supporting infrastructure load is a popular metric in the industry. PUE measurements give us a yardstick (in the absence of a better one) to measure and compare even though the number of variable factors at play are numerous including climate, age, utilization, resiliency and redundancy requirements.”

Environmental sustainability has gained some much needed attention as corporations are increasingly realizing their responsibility towards it and looking for means to build more sustainable desktop and server infrastructures. They are also seeking ways to lessen the environmental impact of their businesses. There are a number of places you can easily target to reduce energy consumption and cut costs. Managing power settings and consolidating servers can be of much use in managing power and ensuring its judicious and optimal utilization.

Kuruvilla Lukose, CTO, Altair India, said, “High Performance Computing (HPC) offers tremendous opportunities for implementing green initiatives. PBS Professional is one of the top workload managers for HPC (High Performance Computing) with new features to reduce power consumption. There is not only an ‘auto switch-off’ feature for machines not in use; but also an ‘auto switch-on’ feature, which switches on precisely the number of machines required to complete the workload. This feature is termed as green provisioning.”

Storage

Clearly there has been a significant increase in storage demand, increasing data center uptake of storage. Companies are investing in additional data centers to enhance or meet disaster recovery and business continuity requirements—all of which require huge storage capacities.

Therefore, there is a need for adopting greener data center technologies. This extends right from the design of the buildings and cooling systems of the data center, to the extensive application of virtualization to increase server utilization. The use of energy-efficient equipment, power supplies and power managed processors also impact energy efficiency.

Data centers that use lots of direct-attached storage can see significant power savings by implementing a storage network. File server consolidation increases the ability to scale in a power-efficient manner; instead of adding servers, you can scale by adding disks. Adding disks to an existing system has the additional advantage of allowing you to amortize operational costs over more drives. Storage resources can be used efficiently by minimizing the use of primary storage and migrating data to secondary storage wherever possible. Newer developments in storage technology enables thin provisioning, a technique that lets storage administrators quickly and dynamically resize flexible volumes, eliminating the need for over-allocation.

Kothandaraman Karunagaran, Director, Infrastructure Services, CSC in India, said, “In any data centre, storage is the most voraciously growing piece of hardware equipment. IDC pegs raw storage growth as now approaching a whopping 60% compounded annual growth rate. Whatever savings we are making from server consolidation projects, we are spending it back due to storage growth. As with server-focused energy conservation projects, we need to kick-start storage energy savings by consolidating storage infrastructure. Consolidated storage assures more efficient and centralized management, dramatic power savings, and also alleviates the need of staffing, resource and training constraints. Certainly, when compared to Direct Attached Storage (DAS), the merits of consolidated networked storage are clear. Once the organization has replaced hundreds, even thousands of its under-utilized, direct attached drives with efficient and/or virtualized arrays, power consumption is greatly reduced.”

Manoj Mehta, Country Manager - India and SAARC Operations, Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation, said, “As design-to-manufacture organizations generate a lot of data right through the entire process, the organization should opt for either storage devices that have a minimal adverse impact on the environment or opt for the cloud.”

Virtualized storage environments are opted for by almost all companies nowadays. There are many service providers offer storage as a service on an OPEX model today and organizations can opt for it. They are advised to discuss the security policy of the organization and the backup/secondary storage requirements before taking this call.

Display monitors

End-user computing is often a low priority for green IT initiatives. Perhaps because the cost of that energy is often distributed across departments and the per device energy requirements are low compared with the cooling and computing systems in data centers. Nevertheless, in large organizations, the collective energy used by end-user devices is often greater than the energy used in a data center.

A typical desktop computer uses about 65 to 250 watts. Some computers use more. With most devices you can look at the label to see how much energy they use, but that doesn't work so well with computers because the label gives the theoretical maximum, not the typical amount used. A computer whose label or power supply says 300 watts might only use about 70 watts when it's actually running, and 100 watts even at peak times with serious computing and all the drives spinning.

Gautam Ghosh, Country Manager, Viewsonic Technologies India, said, “Monitors with LCD screen and LED technology would be the best choice. An LCD screen increases the display resolution and LED saves power. They are usually more compact, lightweight and portable. One should also see whether a monitor has an energy star rating and eco mode.”

LCD monitors typically use a cold-cathode fluorescent bulb to provide light for the display. Some newer displays use an array of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in place of the fluorescent bulb, which reduces the amount of electricity used by a display.

Naresh Shah, Managing Director, Novell IDC & Vice President, Global Engineering Strategy, said, “As for monitors, the average power consumption of a typical 17-inch CRT unit is 76 watts. That compares to 20 watts for the same sized LCD monitor. In addition, CRT monitors put a real strain on heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in many office buildings because they get so hot.”

Rajiv Bhalla, Country Head – Sales & Marketing, NEC India, said, “LCD monitors have a definite edge over CRT monitors in terms of cost effectiveness, space economy, improved image quality, reduced radiation etc. Further improvements are being made to improve the features and performance level of the LCD screens.”

Recycling programs

Initiatives such as recycling programs can help reduce levels of both hazardous and non-hazardous waste, resulting in a healthier environment for employees.

Recycling helps as it uses less new materials and less energy and helps to keep waste out of landfills, minimizing their size and environmental impact. While organizations look for various means to be environmentally responsible, there is a lot which can be contributed by adopting recycling policy within the organization. The benefits of recycling by businesses include sizable energy and resource savings. Recycling helps in saving a lot of expense, demanded for the production of new products from raw materials. Also, the energy required to process recycled raw material is less as compared to processing the original raw material. Manufacturing products from recycled materials also tends to result in less air and water pollution.

Vipin Tuteja - Executive Director, Marketing, Business Support & International Business, Xerox India, said, “Xerox promotes return and reuse/recycle approach empty cartridges of toner or consumables. The latest technology in the toner segment is the Emulsion Aggregation (EA) toner which is a breakthrough technology for producing black and color toner. It is a chemically grown toner that reduces the amount of energy and waste associated with printing and ensures 60-70% energy savings per printed page. Waste management or the recyclability of waste that is being generated is another area that Xerox focuses on. Under this initiative, we ensure that no waste is left in the open market. We sign contracts with customers to recycle waste and take it to our warehouses so that it can be disposed of in an environmentally-friendly manner.”

Anand Naik, Director Systems Engineering, Symantec, said, “Recycling not only helps in reducing cost but also helps in controlling carbon footprint. We are focused on reducing waste, not only through source-reduction initiatives but also by pursuing on-site recycling initiatives and environment-friendly equipment disposal. We have integrated the concept of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ into the software and software packaging manufacturing processes. Consumer products are packaged in smaller boxes than in previous years which require less material to build, produce, and store. New package designs are already distributed at 70% of retail outlets in the Americas and are being introduced in the EMEA and the APJ regions. We have also implemented a program to reuse cardboard packaging, shipping cartons and other materials. The company has switched to cleaner printing inks and replaced hard plastic CD cases with flexible paper and plastic envelopes. As a cost-saving and recycling effort, Symantec IT commonly stores electronic devices that are decommissioned but have not yet reached their full life cycle. Redeploying the devices to projects and labs for reuse avoids costs associated with new equipment purchases; it also reduces waste. We contract with third party disposal companies to dispose of devices that are no longer deemed useful, and require that they be disposed of in an environmentally friendly way.”

Recycling also helps in keeping the neighborhood environment clean from waste, reduces scatter of toxic materials and focuses manufacturers to produce products that will be environmentally friendly after end-of-life. In addition, from a business perspective, recycling has helped in effectively managing costs. Companies that have used waste prevention and recycling programs have established a better equation with their customers and employee relations have improved by involving environmentally-conscious people.

manjari.juneja@expressindia.com