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The greening of IT: Do it yourself
Analysis: Basic steps for back at the office...

By Stewart Baines

Published: Friday 02 November 2007

Electricity-hogging data centres may attract the environmentalists' ire but the humble office has a lot to answer for in terms of carbon emissions, says Futurity Media's Stewart Baines.

Two themes dominate the green IT agenda: how to tackle the insatiable demands of the data centre and what Silicon Valley can do to reduce its environmental footprint.

However worthy these two themes, there is a third significant area of activity where a change of practice could dramatically reduce the demands IT puts on the environment. About 50 per cent of IT's carbon footprint is generated by the office. Much can be done to reduce this without breaking the bank.

At the most trivial level, screen savers provide a good example. Individually they may only consume a few watts of power but if active on thousands of desktops and laptops they could be costing large companies tens of thousands of pounds per year more than using screen blanking.

Better still, staff could be encouraged to turn off the PC, not just at night but also when they go to a meeting or lunch.

Automated software updates can pick up where they left off. If you do not trust your staff to turn off PCs, software such as Watchman can turn machines off for you - for instance, when the building is closed and the desktop is not performing a critical operation.

Even the humble phone charger could be costing you money when underutilised. If there is no handset plugged in it still draws power, so ensure that staff do not leave phone and laptop chargers plugged into the wall when not being used.

Output optimisation

Output is another area where considerable energy savings could be made.

Colm Feighoney, a green IT consultant with IBM Global Services, says: "Many of the organisations I come across have far more printers than they ever imagined because an individual department can nip along to PC World and buy an inkjet with no consideration for the total cost of ownership. These things aren't even network-attached so they can't be managed properly."

Printers and copiers sit idle, consuming power. Combining printer, copier, fax and scanner in one device will save a considerable amount of standby energy. According to Toshiba, a copier, two printers and a fax machine consume on average 1400kWh of energy each year, while a multifunction machine uses around 700kWh.

Even without a multifunction device, simply imposing a new printing regime can reduce the environmental burden. "You can have printers set to mono as default and have colour as the exception. Double-sided, draft quality - for most users it probably doesn't make a lot of difference," adds Feighoney.

A 50-person office could save £3,000 per year through double-sided printing, according to manufacturer Canon.

Using recycled paper can contribute to reducing global emissions, with quality and cost no longer a barrier. "We looked at recycled paper a couple of years ago and it was slippery, grainy and dusty. But it's improved so much," explains Richard Dawson, IT director at Bracknell Forest Borough Council.

Dawson continues: "A typical case of ordinary paper we bought last month was £30 and that's for general meeting notes. We've switched it now to recycled at £12 a case. To me it's a no-brainer. We've tested it in all our printers and there are no problems with the quality."

Balancing act

Dawson has been reviewing the entire IT estate at Bracknell Forest Borough Council to find ways of conserving energy. It is a delicate balancing act between sweating assets or adopting newer, low-energy devices that consume less and so cost less.

There is a considerable burden in purchasing new equipment. There are costs associated with responsible disposal - namely compliance with the WEEE Directive - and environmental costs of manufacturing and distribution of new devices.

According to Computer Aid International, a not-for-profit organisation supplying used computers to developing countries, a PC consumes more than 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels during manufacture.

But why use a CRT monitor when a newer TFT screen may consume less than a third of the power of its predecessor and consequently pay for itself within 18 months?

Bracknell Forest Council calculated there was clear environmental and economic benefit to replacing its entire CRTs inventory with TFTs that put out less heat and therefore less strain on the air conditioning.

However, if you are going to do a simple cost-benefit on migrating to energy-efficient devices, you need to be careful about the figures used.

The energy plate rating on hardware is only an indication of how much it uses when running at full tilt - most PCs will use only between 60 and 70 per cent of full power when performing multiple operations and spend a considerably smaller amount on mundane tasks.

Dawson decided to attach a measuring device to an old PC and a new PC to find out how much energy is being used by each on similar tasks. He says: "This is not an idle experiment. I need to work out what mileage there is in accelerating the migration to Energy Star-compliant PCs."

The results of this may mean that PCs are retired earlier than expected but their replacements will have a longer shelf life than their forerunners.

Richard Dawson has told Bracknell Forest Borough Council's supplier, Dell, that it will not be refreshing this new wave of PCs for five years. In the past, machines were typically replaced every three years. Dawson has also asked the computer supplier to reduce the amount of packaging used.

Waste not

"We think a lot about our waste. We give the cardboard from PC packaging to people moving homes and even promote the use of the cardboard for making compost," says Dawson.

Dawson adds: "And when we disposed of the monitors we did so in an ethical way. It doesn't go into landfill or get put into containers and shipped to India where it becomes someone else's problem."

Deciding when to retire assets, particularly computing ones, may get easier with the gradual adoption of virtualised applications and eventually thin client computing.

IBM's Feighoney says: "Refresh is not usually dictated by hardware failure. It's usually that the software won't run on the old machine. This can be overcome with virtualised applications."

He adds: "An aging PC could be easily transformed into a Linux virtual machine that doesn't need a lot of maintenance unless it physically breaks."

Virtualised applications - while shifting some of the energy load to a data centre - have a number of environmental benefits: longer hardware upgrade cycles, reduced engineer visits and more efficient processing. They also support flexible working, hence less travel.

Whether the option is to make better use of equipment already in the office or adopt newer energy saving devices, there is clearly a need to be financially accountable.

Dawson adds: "Our green policies are not a passing fad. The business case may have to be based on the financial angle but we're discovering that it is frequently the same as the greening. It saves money in the long run." And this is the moral of the story: use less, save more.