Guilty as charged

Paul Glover, senior business consultant, emissions solutions, with the newly renamed Logica, explained how the company is heavily involved in the running of carbon trading schemes overseas and Logica is already consulting on similar registries and emissions schemes in Australia such as the the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. The company hopes to play a part in the Australian carbon trading initiative of the federal government, which is expected to start in 2010. However Glover pointed out that the initial reporting regime starts this year, with management now required to start tracking their carbon usage from July 1 this year. The first reporting period is October next year, but compliance begins this year and Logica believes few are prepared for the complexities this will involve.

Fortunately for the environment though, there’s an equally strong motivation to conserve energy in the data centre – cost.

Research done by Symantec, which asked 800 data centre managers about their priorities, showed that while 85 percent indicated that increasing the efficiency of its energy use was listed as a high priority, reducing toxic materials was not so important.

In the same survey, 71 percent of respondents indicated they were at least considering implementing a Green data centre, but only two percent already had one and 29 per cent were not even considering it globally.

The research showed there are many approaches being used, with server virtualisation and consolidation and the use of energy-efficient CPUs the top contenders.

Malcolm Mackay, business development executive with IBM Australia, confirmed virtualisation can have substantial Green as well as economic benefits.

“IBM’s virtualisation technologies can allow clients to go from five to 10 percent utilisation to nearly 100. This can translate to power savings of more than 25 percent,” he said.

Mackay also pointed to managed services as a great way to focus on Green, but not always. “If your managed service provider doesn’t have a sustainable approach to IT then you are just transferring the problem, so make sure you pick a provider with a Green policy you feel comfortable with.”

Both virtualisation and low-powered CPUs tackle the same problem – reducing the core energy requirement of the data centre, but as Emerson’s Spiteri explained the pay off is far greater than it would at first seem. While processor power accounts for only 15 percent of data centre power consumption there is a cascading effect that promises major returns from small incremental improvements.

“The biggest contributor to power is on the processor side,” he said. “They don’t use much power, but with all the infrastructure required to support them a single watt saved in the server can translate to a 2.84 watt saving overall when you factor in things such as power transformation, UPS and cooling.”

Reardon at Linksys also claimed that while the creation and usage of technology might have harmful effects, it also has the potential to reduce emissions.

“We believe that collaboration technologies such as TelePresence, sold by Cisco, let employees conduct virtual meetings without having to travel to one physical location, saving the fuel necessary for transportation while maintaining a high level of interaction and participation,” said Reardon. “At Cisco we call it Carbon to Collaboration which is an initiative to seek to reduce employees’ overall carbon footprint by replacing air travel with virtual collaboration over the network.

“We believe that building and developing technology such as TelePresence into small offices and the home will enable additional savings for teleworkers and families,” he added.

Reardon also pointed to other ways technology can help the environment, by using the network to gather as many relevant data sources as possible, not just IT assets, to monitor power efficiency.

“Given the network’s ability to touch anything that consumes power, fixed or mobile, it is able to identify more points of optimisation than any other system,” he said.

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