Going green can also help save money
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Technology is helping to reduce power costs and meet the hype of green IT, but many CIOs and business managers are still more focused on business and agility than power consumption. The good news though is that IT companies have delivered huge increases in power efficiency as well as tools and methodologies to meet this "Green Bet".
Speaking at the IDC conference on "Green IT, the Economy of Ecology" in Bangkok, Attaphon Satidkanitkul, senior analyst for IDC's IT services group, said that the most recent CIO survey still showed most CIOs to be concerned about budget, innovation and customer satisfaction ahead of green IT. Yet, on the positive side, 38 per cent of the CIOs surveyed had a green IT component in their purchasing methodology.
IDC speaks of the Green Bet. CIOs are still focused on data centre transformation and building web sites for internal collaboration. Likewise, line of business is still focused on business operations and customer satisfaction above anything else.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has measured energy usage from 2000 and projected its rise to 2011. As of 2007, data centres use 1.5 per cent of all power generated in the US and this is forecast to reach 2.9 per cent if things continue as they are.
"This is a crisis in IT," he said.
New technologies can help reduce the numbers slightly, but if IT is used instead to enable virtual offices and change business practices, power consumption can be reduced by up to a third. By 2010, smart electricity grids (generation and transmission) can save up to 2.03 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year. Smart offices will save 1.68 gigatonnes. Smart car engines will save only 0.97 gigatonnes and smart logistics can save up to 1.52 gigatonnes of CO2 a year.
IT has a large role to play in enabling the smart office and smart logistics.
Eddie Toh, regional platform marketing manager for Intel's server platforms group, also urged the audience not to look at the two per cent of power being consumed in the data centre, but at how better IT can help save power in the remaining 98 per cent of the world.
"Intel makes 80 per cent of that two per cent. How can we use the technology to improve energy efficiency outside of ICT? That is the big opportunity for all of us," he said.
Back in 2006, for every $1 spent on hardware, 50 was spent a year on power and cooling. By 2010, that figure is forecast to be between 70 and 90.
A clear sign of the importance of power is that Google is building its new data centre near a hydroelectric dam.
Toh said that in the past 30 years, the efficiency of Intel's transistors has gone up by one million times. Today Intel claims industry leading performance per watt both at the CPU level and the server level through working with HP and others.
For the server space, Intel's latest 45-nanometre high-K Xeon processors go as low as 50 watts with a idle power consumption as low as 16 watts.
Toh quoted figures from spec.org's new spec power benchmark and showed the 45nm Xeons taking all of the top 10 spots.
"Our competition is second last out of 37 or 36 on spec.org," he said.
Refreshing old technology helps to drastically reduce power consumption. Replacing a four year old system while maintaining the same amount of power will deliver eight times the performance.
Virtualisation helps especially if the data centre is full of idle servers with five or 10 per cent usage.
Today Intel is trying out Intel Dynamic Power Technology which promises up to 40 per cent improvements in performance per watt by controlling the amount of power distributed throughout a rack more intelligently while at the same time allowing for even denser racks.
It is also working on a intelligent cooling, for instance cooling low density racks or idle racks only to 24 and turning down the temperature to 20 when the racks are fully in use.
On the manufacturing side, Intel's new Fab 68 in Dalian, China recycles water and heat generated in one are for use elsewhere.
Sanpat Sophon, managing director of HP Thailand spoke of how HP now has the data centre management software (though its acquisition of Mercury two years ago), the services (through its acquisition of EDS) and the hardware that helps to save energy.
Its latest printers consume less than one watt of energy an hour in idle mode and Halo telepresence has cut travel costs and CO2 emissions immensely.
However, one of the biggest success stories of HP has been its data centre consolidation. Three years ago, HP had 87 data centres and a plan to reduce it to three centres in 17 months. In doing so, the energy saved is enough to power a town the size of Palo Alto. It has set itself an ambitious target of actually reducing total power consumption by 25 per cent compared to 2005 levels by 2010 and has recently installed a 1.2 megawatt solar panel system.
Sanpat extolled the virtues of Dynamic Smart Cooling which is here, today and can save between 25 to 40 per cent of the energy bill of a typical data centre through better planning, using virtualisation to move loads around and not over-cooling. HP also has a planning department which has designed over 2.97 million square metres of data centres, of which 1.85 million square metres has already been commissioned. Sanpat also said that HP was the first to audit its suppliers with a checklist of over 400 green criteria to pass before buying from them.
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