Fixing the data centre
As Senior Editor Stephanie Overby writes in "Clean, Green Machines", data centres consume between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of all the power generated annually in the United States — at the high end, that's equivalent to the electricity needed to power the state of Michigan for one year.
But most IT departments don't have a good grasp of their electricity bills because they don't control the facilities their data centres occupy. One company, VistaPrint, where the IT department does manage its data centre facilities, discovered that its electric bill was projected to skyrocket if the company, which sells custom printed products online, grew as predicted.
When Cable & Wireless, which hosts one of VistaPrint's data centres, threatened to charge the company extra to cover the cooling costs for its blade servers, then-CIO Wendy Cebula (now the company's COO) asked her IT operations director to improve energy efficiency. The project eventually led to the construction of a second, more energy-conscious data centre in Canada, where hydropower provides a renewable, lower-emissions source of electricity. The company now projects savings of 70 percent on its electricity bills. It will also save $US450,000 annually by replacing its blade servers with virtual machines that use more server capacity and consume less power. Within a year, VistaPrint will be reducing the emissions from its data centres to a degree equivalent to taking more than 100 cars off the road for a year.
VistaPrint has benefited in part from the increasingly heated competition among chip makers and server vendors to out-green each other. But which server provides the greatest power consumption savings for the buck depends on how you plan to use it. Existing benchmarks that measure application performance or CPU utilization aren't much help because they don't measure power consumption, notes Brent Kirby, a product manager with AMD. Groups including the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are researching a new generation of benchmarks that address server electricity usage, while an effort among computer manufacturers known as The Green Grid aims to identify best practices for data centre power management.
Meanwhile, using more efficient cooling systems, or simply sealing holes in your data centre's floor, can reduce energy consumption and, ultimately, greenhouse gas emissions. Your company wins by lowering its energy costs, and the planet wins too.
The green advantage
IT's contribution to corporate sustainability doesn't stop at the data centre door. New and anticipated environmental regulations are prompting companies to re-examine everything from their business processes to their product lines.
As Associate Staff Writer Katherine Walsh writes in "Can IT Make Your Company Green?", companies are beginning to pay more attention not only to what goes into their products but how those products are made. And whether they're tracking systems for monitoring plant emissions, using databases to analyze material use or implementing operational controls, they need IT to do it. These systems can pay dividends beyond keeping companies out of legal trouble, or having their non-compliant products barred from global markets. At Dow Chemical, CIO David Kepler says technology investments that monitor energy use have saved Dow billions.
Other systems are expected to generate top-line revenue growth by helping companies make better products. Both furniture maker Herman Miller and Timberland, which makes outdoor apparel, cater to environmentally conscious customers (and satisfy regulators) by developing products using recycled materials and eliminating toxics from their production processes. IT integrates the databases that track the use of materials with those that manage the production processes in order to optimize the efficiencies the companies reap from these green initiatives.
You have an advantage if your company has already made environmentally sound practices a priority. In Chicago, the law firm Kirkland & Ellis is constructing a green building, with design parameters that include lower power consumption and more efficient air conditioning.
"There are regulations, there are savings to the firm and there's just being a good citizen," says Kirkland & Ellis CIO Steve Novak. "If there's any way you can reduce consumption, it's good for all."
If your company has not embraced its environmental responsibilities, it's only a matter of time before it will be forced to or suffer the consequences. "Green issues are going to be climbing up the consumer and investor and media agenda," notes Gartner's Mingay. "At some point in time, this increased focus is going to affect the enterprise."
The question CIOs have to answer is, will you be ready?
Executive Editor Elana Varon can be reached at evaron@cio.com
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