Guilty as charged

Most IT vendors have a Green story to tell and all are working to be certified by one environmental group or another, but the increasingly encouraging factor is that the industry is now moving beyond the recyclable packaging story to take a good long, hard look at their manufacturing processes and at
other measures.

Communications products manufacturer D-Link for example has recently embarked on its Green Ethernet-branded initiative based on RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) and WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) directives. These products conserve power by doing things such as shutting down ports that are not in use and ensuring that the manufacturing process and supply chain are environmentally friendly.

Similarly, Linksys, recognising that power and packaging are two easy areas to target is awaiting certification of its Energy Star ratings routers, switches, storage to voice that will help in the reduction of power needed for running the device as well as saving power when the devices are not in use.

Linksys is also about to debut an eco-friendly packaging initiative in Australia in April. “The new packaging will result in more than 40 percent reduction of paper waste compared to our former packaging,” said Graeme Reardon, Australian country manager for the Cisco subsidiary. “The inside packaging materials will also be made of 100 percent recycled and bio-degradable materials. We will begin this package treatment on our new Wireless-N products and will be phasing it in on all new and currently sold products over the next 12 months.

“Another initiative we are working on is driving eco-friendly products and usage to save on waste. We believe putting content onto the network, and backing it up of course will free consumers and businesses from clutter while putting paper and materials they were originally on to good use via recycle reprograms,” he said.

It’s not just hardware that lands on your doorstep with plenty of packaging. On the software side, Symantec is working to minimise the amount of packaging involved in its product delivery. While the company has already led the way in many respects by pushing electronic product delivery, some applications are still seen as too large for download, especially in the enterprise space, explained Paul Lancaster, systems engineering director at Symantec Australia. He said the company is working to reduce the use of boxed shrink-wrapped software in favour of simple CD delivery in the consumer sector. For enterprise, Symantec is working on ways to compact enterprise applications down to a single set of binaries (for Windows and Linux) to make them more downloadable. Combined with encryption he said the company has so far been able to reduce a 350MB install file down by about a third to just 130MB.

While more sustainable manufacturing processes, and the reduce, reuse and recycle mantra are all critical factors, it’s power consumption that is making the biggest headlines though. The data centre has been fingered as the biggest culprit in the assault on the environment.

You already know the carbon emissions story in the data centre. The processors use 15 percent of the power, server power supplies chew through 14 percent, other server components use up 15 percent. Storage systems and communications equipment require only four percent each according to metrics from Emerson Network Power.

According to Peter Spiteri, director of marketing for the company, it’s the cocoon that we have to wrap these production systems in that contributes the rest, with cooling alone requiring 38 percent of the energy needs of a typical 464 square metre data centre.

With carbon trading just around the corner, you would think that would be enough to motivate data centre managers to change their ways, but there’s a far more pressing situation arising. There just isn’t enough power in many cities to keep supplying the ballooning costs of our ever-growing data centres and Australian users are already finding that their energy growth needs can no longer be met by supply companies.

as charged guilty strategy