Archive for the ‘Green IT’ tag
Greening IT in the Hotel Industry
Last week I gave a presentation on Sustainable IT in the hotel industry. It’s surprising how much IT equipment goes into building the IT infrastructure of a larger hotel. There is the server that handles the reservations, another to handle programming the room keys. There are the restaurant servers, the gift shop servers, and the rooms management servers. There’s even a server to handle the in-room movies!
There are computers in the office, computers in the business center, and–in some hotels–computers in the rooms. There are displays in the hallways guiding guests to their conference rooms, computers at the front desk, and in the kitchens. Not to mention the wireless Internet access that is available throughout the hotel.
Server consolidation, server virtualization, and enabling power management are the three fastest ways to reduce IT-related energy consumption in the hotel industry.
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Two years ago this February, I went for a routine exam at a major hospital center here in Boston. I was sitting on the exam table, dressed in my disposable gown. As I dangled my feet over the exam table, I looked at the PC in the corner. It was on. So was the monitor, which was showing the Windows screen saver. I remembered seeing computers in other rooms, all on, with the Windows screen saver running. I asked my doctor: “Does anyone shut these off at night?” The answer was no.
I thought I would try some back-of-the-envelope calculations to gauge potential power management savings. The average computer at that time consumed 100 watts per hour. The monitor, an old-fashioned CRT, added another 83 watts. If there were 100 such computer setups in the exam rooms and administrative areas, the hospital would require 18.3 kilowatts per hour to power them. At a rate of 15 cents per kilowatt, that’s a $160,300 annual cost just to power the a subset of the IT equipment.
When I got back to my office, I emailed the hospital’s CFO. Three weeks later, I received an email from one of his employees. He said that I had some energy saving ideas that might be worth exploring. He invited me to come to his office for a meeting.
And that’s where the story ends. Why? Because I had a crisis of confidence. I couldn’t believe that this prestigious teaching hospital with an annual operating budget of $500 million needed me to tell them how much electricity they could save through power management. Besides, what if I was wrong? Although Tech Networks had just been written up on the front page of the Boston Globe for our energy-saving Earth-PCs, I was by no means an expert on Green IT at that point.
Instead of going to meet with them, I referred them to a company that specializes in power management software. I checked in with the company’s sales rep a few months later. He said that there had not been a sale.
If that hospital had implemented power-management software, they could have reduced the electricity required to power those PCs by 60%. In terms of CO2 emissions, that’s the same as taking 83 passenger vehicles off the road. What if I had managed to win them over?
I drive a Prius. But even if I drove my Prius for 100 years, I couldn’t match the CO2 savings achievable by turning on power management on this hospital’s PCs for just a single year.
I subsequently realized that my company has an important role to play in helping other businesses transition to a more sustainable form of computing. Information Technology is a resource requiring massive amounts of labor and materials to design, build, deploy, use, decommission and destroy. Our mission has always been to help people use this technology. But our mission now is to help people use the right technology in the right ways. And that technology must be respectful of our planet.
In order to be viable in the context of today’s economic challenges, it is important that each sustainability initiative be both cost- and time-effective. Specific Green IT solutions make economic sense for some businesses but not for others. Without a full understanding of business needs, it is impossible to determine what computing solutions will best meet them.
Negawatts
Negawatts: The watts saved when a decision is made to save electricity not through efficiency but simply by ceasing to perform the activity that required electricity. For example, many companies have discontinued scheduled full virus scans, thereby saving the energy that was required to scan the entire hard drive. I got this term from a white paper on Green IT from KPMG.
I love the term “negawatts.” It invites us to re-examine every routine activity from a utilitarian perspective. Does the client really need a redundant power supply on every server? What if Tech Networks just kept a few HP server power supplies on hand in case of emergency? If an hour of downtime for some servers is acceptable, why not save electricity and resources by ordering a server with just one power supply? Anyway, a server with redundant power supplies is not truly redundant. The circuit board that allows power supply failover is a single point of failure.
Here’s another area where negawatts make sense: Stop leaving your office computer on at night so that you can access it remotely. There are so many other ways for you to get email and files without leaving your computer on. Remote access software vendors need to own up to the fact that their software forces subscribers to waste energy.
At Tech Networks, most employees use their own laptop to access company resources. Whether they are at the office, at home, or at an Internet cafe, the process is the same.
Many of us take the commuter rail to the office. With a broadband card, we are able to hook up and get the day started early. Our resource manager starts deploying the troops from his seat on the train at 6:00AM.
Tech Networks also pays for 50% of employees’ public transportation passes. I guess keeping cars off the road doesn’t earn us negawatts, but it sure counts as negamiles!
It’s Not Easy Being Green
It may be trite to begin a Green IT blog post by stealing a line from Kermit the Frog. But this misappropriated malapropos repeats in my mind as we grapple with our Sustainable IT methodology. It’s not easy being green. We are fighting climate change, which means that we need to slow the warming of a planetary weather system. How could it be easy? So far, worldwide efforts to go green are a failure. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise and even the rate at which they increase is increasing.
It is for good reason that environmental writers such as Thomas Friedman and Bill McKibben deride the glib green-washing group of copy writers crowing over their ten easy steps green guides. Bill McKibben’s group, 350.org, makes the case that we need to lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350ppm as quickly as possible or risk global climate catastrophe.
Into this climate cacophony steps Greener Gadgets with their upcoming Green Gadget conference in New York. This event was brought to my attention by Roger Bruist, our new Green Technology Architect. My initial reaction was entirely negative. A gadget is usually an ingeniously engineered article whose function is often less important than its design. I’m of the belief that we need to go back to basics to save the planet. Too many of the gadgets I see around our office are cheap toys hawked by sites such as Think Geek.com
On closer examination, however, it appears that that the green gadgeteers have put together a program that addresses many of the same issues we confront as we build our Sustainable IT methodology. Given the real energy and resource costs of PC manufacturing, when is it responsible to replace existing equipment with more efficient models? How do we bring technology to the developing world in areas that need to develop a power infrastructure not based on our current carbon-intensive model? It looks like I’ll be taking the train to New York in a couple of months to find out.
Real Green IT Workshop
Finally! After months of research and planning, we unveiled our program for assessing IT-related power usage and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Code name: Project Greenhouse. The workshop was held The Connection, next to the store. Food provided by the Haley House, a non-profit whose programs include a bakery training program for disadvantaged Roxbury residents.
We had 27 RSVPs but the turnout was over 30 people. There was a very high level of interest in the material, as evidenced by the questions participants asked and the number of followup appointments generated in response to the event.
We’ll be doing many more of these workshops as we continue to develop our methodology. Stay tuned!