Preventing unwanted legacies

Pointing the finger

With more and more column inches being devoted to the role that IT plays in contributing to carbon emissions, why are so few companies putting measures in place to combat the problem? Data centres are by far the biggest culprit, with figures from Gartner showing that the energy consumed by a fully equipped, 30,000 square foot data centre will produce 44,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Indeed, the recent draft Climate Change Bill identified the fact that data centres consume as much as 1.5% of all UK electricity.

This is mainly due to the vast amounts of data and information which companies across all sectors now need to hold, for regulatory and business continuity purposes. Storage capacity and the sheer scale and number of data centres have both increased, and so has the amount of energy used to power them. The rise in popularity of the 'mega' data centre, housing more than a million servers, is also adding to the problem.

However, the costs associated with running a data centre also have a big part to play in combating the problem. Traditionally, the IT manager never sees the electricity bills, but with a predicted three-fold rise in IT energy budgets within five years, the IT department needs to become more accountable. As soon as it understands where the money is being spent and how much it is paying for the electricity it uses, there is some hope that energy and cost efficiency issues will move higher up the corporate agenda.

Taking action

Businesses are not currently going far enough to reduce the impact of data centre operations on carbon emissions, looking instead at individual user policies regarding PC use, rather than at ways of making the data centre run more energy efficiently. The figures may provide a wake up call about the extent of the problem, but very few reports provide advice for managers.

There are some simple steps that businesses can take to help reduce the carbon footprint of the data centre, as well as lowering costs and improving overall efficiencies.

Take a lights out approach Many businesses already take a lights out approach and keep the door to the data centre closed to minimise operator error, but this effort needs to go further. On-demand lighting, which only turns on when someone is present in that part of the data centre should be the next step. With remote management software, there should be minimal need for a physical presence in the data centre but, when it is required, it should have limited impact on the energy consumption of the facility.

Manage capacity and performance better Idle resources use a significant amount of power. Understanding capacity and using the existing IT infrastructure more wisely will have a great impact on the processing power used, as well as providing cost benefits. Server virtualisation is one answer, and very much the buzz-word of the moment, but there are other options to consider. Simply turning off applications that are not in use will provide great savings.

Be clever with cooling Spending on power and cooling systems is set to rise significantly, with IDC predicting that by 2008 more will be spent on this than on new technology itself. However, much of this is wasted by cooling a whole facility when only half of the servers are being utilised. The case of unnecessary cooling was highlighted earlier in the year by Google. The company published research which found that disk drives can tolerate temperatures of 38 degrees Celsius without suffering a higher failure rate, contradicting common perceptions that equipment must be kept cool in order to avoid failure. Understanding consumption and tolerances, combined with better planning can help reduce this wastage and improve efficiency.

Deploy environmental monitoring Technological expansion means that the data centre, already overheating and using vast quantities of power, is becoming an increasingly difficult environment to manage. High density blade server deployments, for example, put increased importance on the role of environmental monitoring technologies to ensure that heat, humidity and other variables do not compromise availability. In addition, standards-based monitoring technologies like IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), facilitate the granular analysis of conditions and could, in the future, be introduced to support non-IT components of the data centre such as air conditioning or the conditions inside the server rack itself. Developments of this nature would add a further level of control and reduce the financial cost of downtime.

Keep the doors closed In addition to putting in place monitoring facilities, simply keeping the doors to the data centre closed will ensure power consumption levels stay low. Having staff walk in and out of the data centre will require the air-conditioning to work faster and use more power to stop equipment overheating. One way to regulate the temperature and get the most out of air-conditioning systems is to keep the doors closed to allow for better heat regulation.

Keeping the doors closed also has a security benefit. Where the focus for IT security was once the threat of viruses and hackers, a greater emphasis is now being placed on physical security. The challenge for the IT manager is to provide the necessary levels of administrative and user access to IT hardware, while at the same time minimising the potential risk to security.

In many data centres it is common to over-allocate and over-build power and cooling, based on a theoretical total capacity. This inevitably creates an extremely inefficient energy model if the data centre is not actually deployed at full capacity. In other words, data centres will have too much cooling in some places, and too little in others, requiring even more cooling to be installed for those over-built areas. Using effective planning tools to model a data centre and match heat-producing devices, such as servers, to heat-recovery devices, like air conditioners, will yield significant reduction in overall energy consumption.

Cut travelling time With over 70% of businesses having between one and five data centres/server locations (Information Age research report: Data Centre Directions), maintaining them will require a significant amount of travelling time. Reducing this time by managing many devices remotely, from any location, will not only allow for faster resolution of problems but will significantly lower the amount of emissions generated from driving.

Off-set emissions Becoming carbon neutral should be the main objective of any business if they are serious about the impact their operation is having on the environment. Taking a lights out approach and driving less are all steps in the right direction, but investing in carbon off-sets is the most practical way of achieving neutrality.

Although no legal requirement exists yet, it is only a matter of time before green legislation comes into play. As good corporate citizens, all organisations should be evaluating their impact on the environment and looking for ways in which to off-set or minimise the detrimental impact of their operations. The vast amount of power required to run the modern enterprise makes the data centre a clear target for green initiatives. And with the rising cost of energy also eating into the bottom line, efficiency makes good business sense too.

Russell Stevens is business development director for EMEA at Avocent, www.avocent.co.uk

What is your carbon footprint?

Free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia defines carbon footprint as a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide or CO2 emitted through the combustion of fossil fuels. In the case of an organisation, business or enterprise, this is as part of their everyday operations; in the case of an individual or household, as part of their daily lives; or, in a product or commodity, in reaching its market. In materials, it is essentially a measure of embodied energy, the result of life cycle analysis.

A carbon footprint is often expressed as tons of carbon dioxide or tons of carbon emitted, usually on a yearly basis. There are many versions of calculators available for carbon footprinting.

This is directly related to the amount of natural resources consumed, increasingly used or referred to as a measure of environmental impact. Carbon dioxide is recognised as a greenhouse gas, of which increasing levels in the atmosphere are linked to climate change.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol sets forth a methodology by which voluntary emission reduction can be monetised in the form of a carbon project. These standards involve the use of an environmental proof called additionality.