Eric Wilson | June 17, 2008
ON July 1, the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act takes effect, the first shot in an expected barrage of carbon trading and taxation initiatives.
The CIOs of large corporations - responsible for up to 20 per cent of their companies' office emissions, according to Gartner research - are starting to feel the heat. Measuring IT's carbon footprint is proving a challenge, and for IT managers, validating green-dressed offerings can be even harder.Although the cost of IT carbon is still only smoke on the horizon, energy-efficient service providers gleefully await the fallout, as computer greenhouse consultants' diaries fill up.
Steve Hodgkinson, a research director at Ovum, says the carbon footprint at the data centre level is "eminently measurable", while gauging the desktop, where much more waste occurs, is not so easy.
"The traditional fat-client PC sits on a desk burning electricity and throwing out heat," Hodgkinson says. "Just as you would swap out a light bulb for an energy-efficient one, the same logic is being applied to the PC. You can program the Macintosh to turn itself on and on at certain times of the day, ao we are seeing Sun Rays and thin clients, which are little more than a flat screen."
Fujitsu Australia principal sustainability consultant Alison O'Flynn says PCs account for about 40 per cent of the IT carbon footprint, but she warns that the actual footprint of identical systems could differ between states, depending on their source of power.
Virtualising desktops to highly efficient servers is not the only way to slash the desktop power bill. Switching from a tower desktop with a CRT monitor to a notebook computer will reduce consumption by 70 per cent, for example.
However, while green initiatives in the data centre can be monitored simply by looking at the power bill, directly metering the myriad IT appliances dispersed around the enterprise is highly impractical.
The answer, EDS green practice leader Sundep Khisty says, is to develop consumption models from ongoing experience. Consumption models are based on techniques such as consolidating faxes, printers and scanners into a multifunction network device shared by 20 people, default duplex printing, and disabling screen savers in favour of hibernation mode. CRT monitors could be eliminated and notebook computers issued to 40 per cent of staff.
Using these methods, the EDS model predicts, the power consumption of a fleet of 5000 desktops can be reduced by enough to power 1600 new homes. Put another way, the reduction in greenhouse gases will be about 5200 tonnes, the equivalent of taking 1100 cars off the road. These figures sound impressive, but actual results will vary, depending on what efficiency measures and equipment an organisation already has.
Benchmarking this is the first step in controlling the size of future carbon footprints expected to affect the bottom line. However, EDS says consolidating IT infrastructure to save energy can have its own rewards. "For every dollar you spend on a server you will spend 1.5 times more for electricity and cooling over four years," Khisty says.
Reducing that cost is Green IT's hidden carrot. Hodgkinson says he is generally sceptical of "green IT fluffy arguments", but savings can help fund equipment upgrades.
The idea of turning equipment on in the morning and if possible turning it off at night is giving way to a more dynamic, on-demand environment.
"It beggars belief that IT could have been done any other way, but it was like big gas-guzzling cars," Hodgkinson says. "People just ran the thing."
A Microsoft spokesman says Windows Vista enables power-saving on the desktop with less twiddling, while Windows Server 2008 has built-in virtualisation to save resources.
Angus MacDonald, chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, says a Sun Ray appliance draws a maximum of 4W, while a PC normally consumes about 30W of power. "By adopting SunRay thin-client desktops Sun saves $US6 million per year in electricity costs," MacDonald says.
In most organisations nobody cares - yet, EDS says.
"We're finding electricity is measured and monitored by the building facility people and CIOs are not aware of it," Khisty says. "CIOs have to bring that in as part of their activities."
Professionals and end users alike are hard pressed to know what equipment consumes what levels of power for what operations. MacDonald admits there are no standards in place for realistic comparisons, but that will change.
"There are star ratings for dishwashers," Hodgkinson says. "There is no reason why there will not be star ratings on PCs, as there already are on monitors. There will be standards without question.
"People think the internet is costless and environmentally benign," he says. "But all that computing has to happen somewhere."
And somewhere may be a low-cost country with lax carbon footprint standards.