Green IT and everything else

Computer Weekly

Green IT has been a popular discussion in IT circles this year, and it may once have been a nice-to-have on the IT director’s list of options. According to some, however, it’s now being mandated as part of a wider corporate strategy. So what is the industry doing to help IT departments reach their targets?

“I’m seeing a massive shift,” says Osca St Marthe, managing consultant at systems integrator Morse. As IT departments are held more accountable for their expenditure, they can’t focus purely on metrics such as uptime any more, he warns. Power and cooling, and the economic drivers behind them, are becoming more than just fashionable - they’re becoming vital. “There is a personal responsibility that wasn’t there before,” St Marthe warns. “Regulations, coupled with rising energy costs, mean that IT departments can no longer simply sit there and do nothing.”

We’re seeing a mixture of things here. There are people adopting green IT as a response to rising energy costs, looking at technologies such as more efficient computers, powering down the pcs’ at night etc. At the same time, we’ve got more pressure from a corporate social responsibility standpoint, and a general lack of data center space in London at the right price/configuration, particularly as requirements are scaled up - anyone got space for 4000 blade servers?

Moving forward we need to break down the elements of the IT and establish what the costs are operationally, financially and establish the current issues from a user standpoint. For example with the desktop, if we re-freshed the desktops every year or two would we not gain from improved performance, lower energy requirements (a newer pc tends to be more efficient), as well as better configuring the platform? Could we not enable things like standby? Could we not virtualize those back office applications and use thin clients ? How much of the desktop experience do the users need and what technologies could achieve this? Could we not restrict the ‘high performance’ trader workstations to fewer users and simply renew the standard desktop? We should be trying to ‘fix’ the cost of the pc and understand the indirect costs of keeping legacy pcs, the “sorry your Pentium4 pc is out of warranty, you need a new hard drive, but we can’t provide this, please buy a new desktop”. This requires management and user buy in.

Once we’ve done the desktop, we can look at the server, the provisioning model, what it is we seek to achieve, understanding that simply refreshing the hardware and using virtualization might reduce our costs and data center energy requirements. All those DL360’s could be ideal candidates for virtualization, those back office infrastructure servers, could we not use the energy efficient or less power intensive processor models?