Getting Green Out of the Data Center

Concerned about energy costs, IT organizations have begun to make significant changes to how their data centers are powered and cooled. But many IT departments haven't yet looked at saving energy throughout the rest of their companies' IT infrastructures. That's shortsighted. Although data centers may use more power per square foot, as a percentage of total power consumption, office equipment is the big kahuna.

"Office equipment has become more highly featured and powerful than ever before, but there's an energy cost to that," says Katherine Kaplan, who manages the US Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star consumer electronics and IT initiatives.

"If you look at overall power consumption, you're seeing almost double for computers and monitors than for data centers," says Jon Weisblatt, senior product manager of the power and cooling initiative at Dell.

Verizon Wireless is one company that's saving plenty of green by going green. Earlier this year, the wireless carrier deployed 1E's NightWatchman power management software, which is designed to put desktop computers and monitors in offices, stores and call centers into power-saving mode after a period of inactivity, overriding any personal settings.

Another 1E product, SMSWakeUp, can 'wake up' those machines to deliver patches and updates after-hours and then shut them down again when the process is complete. "It saved us [money] just turning computers on and off on demand," says CIO Ajay Waghray. He also replaced 7,000 PCs in 10 Verizon call centers with power-sipping Sun Ray thin clients from Sun Microsystems and began a companywide migration to LCD monitors. The managed thin clients use 30 per cent less energy than the non-managed PCs, says Waghray. He estimates that the power management and thin client initiatives combined have decreased the cost of front-office power needs annually.

To Waghray, going green is good business. The projects were good for customer service -- off-hours patching and the more reliable thin clients improved uptime and reduced trouble-ticket volumes by 50 per cent. "To make things more efficient, simple and customer-focused, green becomes a very important factor," he says.

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Here are five tips on increasing the efficiency of front-office equipment:

Do an Energy Audit

It's hard to know where you stand if you don't first measure the efficiency of the equipment you have. Fortunately, a simple, inexpensive meter that fits between the target device plug and the outlet can measure current loads and total power consumption.

Meters include basic models such as P3 International's Kill A Watt or Sea Sonic Electronics's Power Angel, and more-advanced units like the Watts Up Pro from Electronic Educational Devices. Watts Up Pro stores data and includes software for graphing that data over time.

At Geiger Brothers, an audit revealed that computer equipment was consuming nearly as much power after-hours as it was during the day. It became "a driving force behind initiatives to get power consumption down," says Joe Marshall, a business systems analyst and software specialist at Geiger Brothers.

Adopt and Enforce Power Management

"The biggest impact you're going to make in your overall computing environment is to get systems to go to sleep," says Weisblatt. For example, a laptop that uses 14 to 90 watts in full operation uses less than 1 watt in standby mode. Desktops consume even more, and a single CRT monitor may use upward of 90 watts in operation mode.

Some corporations are doing something about it. Network administrator Keith Brown deployed LANDesk Software's LANDesk to manage -- and lock down -- power settings on all laptops, desktops and attached monitors at Gwinnett Hospital System.

Like SMSWakeUp, LANDesk and similar tools can remotely awaken or turn on PCs, upload updates and turn them off again, Brown says. Lenovo recommends configuring employee laptop disk drives to spin down after five minutes of inactivity, setting monitors to go blank at 10 minutes and configuring the machines to go into standby mode after 20.

Dump Those CRTs

Replacing older computers and peripherals with Energy Star-rated equipment can save energy and space, and the decreased power consumption can significantly reduce the need for cooling in office areas. Start with CRT displays. "The biggest offenders are the monitors," says Brown.

Most businesses have already begun phasing out CRTs in favor of more efficient LCDs, which use about one-third of the power. Energy savings can add up. Brown estimates that replacing about 70 per cent of Gwinnett's CRTs with LCD monitors and using automated power management tools has already saved the health care company $32,000 to $65,000 a year in electricity.

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Slim Down the Client

For the desktop, look for equipment with Energy Star 4.0 labels. Compact PC models, such as Lenovo's ThinkCentre A61e desktop or Dell's Inspiron 531, are more power-efficient than standard desktops and save space as well. Compact PCs include Energy Star 4.0-mandated high-efficiency power supplies that are at least 80 per cent efficient.

Jenny Craig is moving to a thin-client setup. Thin clients use less power and space, since they have no disk drives or fans, and the applications run on the server.

Although replacing PCs with thin clients and a presentation server requires adding servers on the back end that boost power demand, the savings on the desktop more than make up for that, says Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer at Wyse. With the 64-bit edition of Presentation Server running on the back end, three 800-watt servers can accommodate 1,000 PCs. That's about 3 watts per client, he says.

For all their energy-saving benefits, thin clients won't work in every case. Northrup Grumman's space technology sector is rolling out 3,000 thin clients and has tested 39 engineering applications. While most of the programs ran just fine on the thin clients, a few graphics-intensive ones didn't work, says Clayton Kau, vice president of engineering.

Print More Efficiently

Desktops and laptops aren't the only areas where IT can improve efficiency. Printer efficiencies get better with every new model. HP claims that the energy efficiency of its printers improves 7 to 15 per cent with each new generation. So, replacing older units with new, Energy Star-labeled models can cut energy costs by as much as 25 per cent.

New technologies also improve efficiency. For instance, last spring, HP began replacing the fluorescent tubes used for photocopying with LEDs in some products. The technology uses 1.4 times less energy in use and one-fourth the power when idle, says HP.

Both Jenny Craig and Terremark Worldwide have configured printers to output double-sided pages by default. While using duplex mode doesn't save energy, it does avoid unnecessary paper use, says Jorge Bandin, VP IS and technology at Terremark.

Administrators can configure duplex printing across all printers, invoke power-saving modes, or configure machines to shut down during specific evening or weekend hours using automation tools available from various printer vendors.Consolidating and better managing printers and other peripherals also saves energy and money. According to Forrester, an individual copier, printer and fax machine can consume 1,400 kilowatt-hours of power annually, but a multifunction printer (MFP) consumes half that amount. Even so, says IDC analyst Keith Kmetz, "for every MFP out there, there are [still] six or seven printers."

MFPs, which combine copying, printing, scanning and faxing, offer additional efficiencies. Terremark, for example, uses them with j2 Global Communications's eFax service to route incoming faxes to e-mail instead of a printer.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution, says Waghray. But the best options will be those that complement the business by simplifying processes, making staffers more efficient and improving customer service.

Even if green isn't the goal, he says, it is a means to those ends. "Start to think about [green computing] as something that's pretty much part and parcel of what you're doing," he says.