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I was having a chat with a student the other day, she asked me to publish a few thoughts on the benefits and challenges with Green IT.  I explained that the concepts are beginning to hit through for a number of reasons, but we still have a way to go.

We need to fight the battles we can win and move on from there, my prime example of this is actually in relation to cars (history, cars and computing, my main areas of interest apart from cooking).

About every six months, someone wakes up and publishes an article highlighting the damage that a 4×4 or a luxury car does to the environment and they’re right. But we’re ignoring the so many millions of legacy cars, those classic cars, those 11 year old ones which haven’t been serviced, use leaded fuel, don’t have a catalytic convertor or offer shocking fuel economy and are not monitored for emissions etc.

If we translate this to IT, we’d have the guy ranting that legacy server72 needs so much power and has a horrific hardware support cost (and indeed I am guilty of this in some respects), without putting it in context – the cost of a re-code is 7 million against 1.5 million support and no-one wants to sign off the risk. Change behavior, focus on what we can achieve and everything else will follow.

As with IT, we need to tackle from both issues, go for the quick wins, which we’ve discussed before, and move on to air flow, to solar power, carbon offsetting, data center design, application coding and looking at the way we do business and our core requirements.

Anyway, rant over, back to my email.

I’ve published the email I sent to him, hope you enjoy it, and if you have any thoughts, do let me know:

Why Green IT can deliver:

• Reduced operating costs – simply upgrading the hardware can achieve direct savings in your support contract and also in the cost of powering the systems
• Enhanced functionality, though this tends to be as a result of combining energy efficient technologies and best practice as part of a consolidation or virtualization project. We might for example be switching our server estate to one based on new servers running VMware, we get the benefits of the energy efficiency savings from the servers combined with virtualization.
• Data center constraints and the cost of power have indirectly mandated it as a technical issue outside of the Public Relations or Corporate Social Responsibility arenas – IT got told but we want more, to achieve this we had to look at where we were allocating power, space and cooling.
• Costs – being green can drive real returns on investment, and often at a low marginal cost, so adopting a blank screensaver costs nothing, but means the pc has less to do when it’s idle, powering off the pc costs very little, have a bios power on and power off setting, and that can save £30 per pc in power.

Challenges with Green IT

• Lack of understanding or preaching – by this I mean we need to sell the concept in line with business objectives – avoid the it’s for the children language and brand the message for the target market, whether it’s business or IT. Energy efficient pc, low operating costs, fantastic performance and serviceability etc.
• Managing the need to act now in terms of what we can achieve now at marginal cost with a great rate of return, and what is a longer term return on investment, which requires more business buy-in and investment. I can’t build a new data center or transform my application to be more efficient and better coded overnight.
• Explaining the concepts – simple statements like, is it really the super fast, super watt processor you want or the mid range one, you know the compute difference is marginal.
• Discussing best practice and ways to achieve it or brand it within the IT, within the business – empower IT to know how to sell it, how to package and deliver it. If they don’t understand the concepts in a way that they can speak to the business, then you’ve got stopped at the front door.

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