IT must be called to account over emissions

Despite their best intentions, many organisations are overlooking the real environmental impact of IT operations. That's down to a major break-down in communications between the board and IT management, argues Dennis Szubert.

The aviation industry is public enemy number one for many environmentalists. Aircrafts pump out more than 600 million tons of carbon dioxide every year - nearly as much as the whole of Africa.

Pressured by the environmentalists, the aircraft manufacturers and operators are pursuing new technologies and approaches to improve fuel consumption.

Green IT from A to Z

Click on the links below to find out more...

A is for Abroad
B is for Blades
C is for Carbon footprint
D is for Data centres
E is for Energy sources
F is for Freecycle
G is for Government
H is for Homeworking
I is for Ice caps
J is for Jobs (Steve)
K is for Kilowatts
L is for Landfill
M is for Mercury
N is for Nanogeneration
O is for Offsetting
P is for Paperless office
Q is for Queen
R is for Recycling
S is for SmartPlanet.com
T is for Travel
U is for Upgrade
V is for Virtualisation
W is for WEEE
X is for Xmas
Y is for You
Z is for Zero emissions

So far, the IT industry has managed to evade such close scrutiny, despite reports that it accounts for as much carbon emission as aviation.

Because of a lack of awareness of the damage IT may be causing, it is often overlooked in companies' green strategies. That omission means that what's in a company's environmental statement may not actually be taking place in its IT department.

Just because a company has a carbon footprint reduction policy, there is no guarantee this penetrates as far as the IT department - perhaps one of the most power-hungry areas of the business.

Recent Quocirca research found that despite much hype over the past few years about corporate commitment to cutting carbon emissions, 35 per cent of companies with a carbon footprint reduction policy do not pass it on to the IT department as a formal objective.

This is either a major oversight, or it may be a sign of a company merely paying lip service to the green agenda. It also showed 61 per cent of respondents do not see a reduction of power consumption as a core directive from the business.

Nowhere is this apparent break-down in communications between the corporate board and IT management more evident than in the data centre, where 55 per cent of managers did not even know how much the data centre electricity bill was.

The data centre is arguably the best place to control and secure IT resources. Powering and cooling of IT equipment can be done more efficiently in a data centre than in an uncontrolled environment.

But this assumes the data centre is well managed. In reality, under the pressure of almost continuous growth and restricted budgets, data centre management is often not all it should be.

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Quocirca interviewed more than 300 US, UK and other European data centre decision makers - IT directors or CIOs, IT managers and data centre managers.

The research focused on how companies are coping with complexity in the data centre, how they are approaching the issues of space and power restrictions and the barriers to adopting best practice in power reduction.

The results showed that some companies are struggling. More than a quarter (28 per cent) admit they do not know the exact number of servers they have, and a similar number are not aware of all devices connected to their networks.

Almost half (47 per cent) do not bother to measure server use, while an incredible one in five say it can take them more than a day to find a server that has gone down.

When it comes to space and power constraints, 10 per cent say they will run out of space this year. But eight per cent do not have any idea when they will run out of space, indicating they are not giving this issue the attention it deserves.

Some 14 per cent have hit a power limit and are unable to get more electricity into the building.

With the recent focus on green computing, it is surprising that less than one-fifth of data centre managers have the data centre electricity bill included in their overall budgets and profit and loss figures.

In many companies the facilities management department simply divides the utility bill among departments based on a formula such as square footage of office space.

While this arrangement heavily favours power-hungry data centre operations, it represents an organisational barrier to driving power efficiency best practice in the data centre.

There are many steps that IT can take to make electricity savings, ranging from the quick and easy, such as switching off PCs overnight or using automated PC shutdown software, to the more strategic, such as using thin clients.

Virtualisation of IT assets, enabling far higher levels of utilisation of servers and storage, is almost certainly the biggest single step a company can take in saving power. But it needs to be implemented in a strategic rather than piecemeal way, with a long-term aim in mind.

A lot can also be done in the data centre to reduce, or more effectively manage, electricity consumption, from simple steps such as using variable speed motors in air-cooling systems, to running equipment only when necessary, sealing floor cut-outs and reducing lighting.

Further measures include replacing older assets with new energy-efficient ones, deploying advanced heat management and embarking on highly targeted retrofitting programmes or even designing new energy-efficient data centres.

But the management structures of many businesses do not encourage such steps. Because data centres do not have financial responsibility for the power they consume there is no real incentive to reduce power consumption.

If anything, the opposite is true as nearly all the steps necessary for saving energy require an up-front investment. Power costs are not accurately reflected in IT chargeback to the organisation, and as a result there is also no pressure from their end-user customers to reduce power consumption.

A green IT strategy has to be a part of an overall green business strategy and take a long-term view. Executives should take the initiative to ensure the data centre power costs are passed through to the IT organisation so that the people best able to influence power usage are incentivised to act.

Data centre power costs should, in turn, be included in calculations of chargeback to the business to accurately reflect the true cost of computing, now that power is becoming a major component.

To read the full report, Data centre asset planning: Regaining control of the data centre, click here.

A leading user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the big picture, Quocirca is made up of a team of experts in technology and its business implications. The team includes Clive Longbottom, Bob Tarzey, Rob Bamforth, Dennis Szubert, Louella Fernandes and Fran Howarth. Their series of columns for silicon.com seeks to demystify the latest jargon and business thinking. For a full summary of the consultancy's activities, see www.quocirca.com.