Governing IT in a Green World

July 9, 2008
2:00pm EDT, 11:00am PDT

George Spafford,
Principal Consultant
Pepperweed Consulting, LLC
“Optimizing The Business Value of IT”
http://www.pepperweed.com

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

Housekeeping

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 Main Presentation

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Agenda

• What does “Green IT” mean anyways

• Supporting the Organization’s Green Strategy
• Potential Risks
• Energy and Economics
• Understanding Costs
• Codify Management’s Intent
• Process Opportunities
• Technical Opportunities
• Continuous Improvement

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Green IT
• Being “green” means to minimize negative environmental impacts and
maximize positive impacts
• IT is a key stakeholder for a variety of reasons
– Energy usage (our focus today)
– E-Waste
– IT services that advance the organization
• From a governance perspective
– Need proper management practices in place
– IT’s role – create and protect value
– Why are we doing this? What are our objectives? How can we help?
• “Green IT” is becoming a buzzword to sell products and services
– Gartner terms it “greenwashing”
– A lot of conflicting messages and bogus claims

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Supporting the Organization’s Green Strategy
• The environment and being “green” is an organizational
issue
– Need to support the goals of the organization and it’s investors /
owners
– Protect and Enhance Brand Reputation
• “We recycle our computers.”
• “We use virtual meetings to cut down on travel”
– Manage Risks
– Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
– Economics – there can be very real benefits
• IT is part of a system
– Need the proper context
– Management ecological impacts is a necessary condition

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Potential Risks
• Increasing Operating Expenses
– Travel and logistics costs are skyrocketing
– Increasing Energy Costs
• Running Out of Power
– Some data centers are being told the grid can’t supply more
electricity
• Global Warming in General
– The cause isn’t the issue
• Damage to the Brand
• Threat of Increased Regulation
• IT Unable to Support the Business
• Competition Solving Issues First

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Primary Issue – Energy and Information
Technologies

IT needs electricity to operate!

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 Energy and Economics (1)
• Simple Supply and Demand
• Demand world-wide is increasing
– 50% by 2030
• As demand increases, so do prices
– Oil cost $113 to $1861
– Oil was $142/bbl on 7/1/082
– Ceteris Paribus
P2
• Equilibrium at Q0,P0
P0
• Jevon’s Paradox
P1
– As technology improved, rather than
fall, consumption increased due to a
drop in prices Price
– My take - The lower the cost, the more
we waste Quantity
Q2 Q0 Q1

1. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/25/business/25energy.php
2. http://www.bloomberg.com/energy/

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 Energy and Economics (2)
• What is happening is that the whole
demand curve is moving out as demand
increases but consumers want it at the
same price

yl
pp
Su
• Supply hasn’t caught up and prices are
going up
P1
• If the US will not pay $142/bbl then
another country will
P0
• We are tightly coupled to oil as an
economy and as the price of oil goes up,
so does the price of substitutes

N
O
• Coal is going up too

ew
ld
D

D
em

em
– Fires half of US power plants

an

an
Price

d
– Coal has doubled in last year

d
– Result – Electricity costs have increased 29% 1 Q0 Q1
Quantity
• So … what does this do to operating
budgets?

1. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2008-06-15-power-prices-rising_N.htm

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Electricity and the Environment
• Obviously, IT runs on electricity
• Demands are increasing
• Produced in large scale predominantly via
– Coal
– Hydroelectric
– Natural Gas
– Nuclear
• Pros and Cons with Each
– Coal burning plants have come a long way in terms of lowering
emissions
• Carbon Footprint
– Amount of CO2 released into the environment by humans
– Carbon Trading – market mechanism that economically incents an
organizations to buy and sell carbon credits
– Carbon tax – government taxes organizations based on CO2 released

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 Data Centers and Electricity
• In the US, data centers consumed 1.5% of all
electricity in 2006 and growing at 12%1
• Data centers forecasted to surpass airlines in terms of
CO2 emissions in 2020 (due to electricity consumed)
– An increase of four fold2
• Studies like these increase visibility
– Brand impacts
– Potential for regulation
• A very certain outcome is increased operating costs if
left unmanaged

1. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/saveenergynow/pdfs/doe_data_centers_presentation.pdf
2. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/data-centers-are-becoming-big-polluters-study-finds/
© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation
 Understanding Costs
• Servers can be utilized as little as 6% on average1
• Data centers can run at 56% of peak performance1
• One watt of IT power used requires about one
watt of cooling
• What about your bill? Do you know what it is for
IT?
• Cost = (Watts x Hours Used) / 1000 x Cost/KW Hr
• Problem is that that there are inefficiencies

1. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/data-centers-are-becoming-big-polluters-study-finds/

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 Power Consumption
• Chiller 33% Notice how only 30% of each
• IT Equipment 30% watt actually goes to the IT
Equipment.
• UPS 18%
Out of every 10 watts sent to the
• Computer Room Air data center, only 3 wind up being
Conditioning (CRAC) 9% used by IT equipment.
• Power Distribution 42% goes to cooling
Units (PDUs) 5%
24% goes to power
• Humidifiers 3%
• Switch / generator 1%
• Lighting 1%

http://www.thegreengrid.org/gg_content/Green_Grid_Guidelines_WP.pdf

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Where to Begin

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Codify Management’s Intent (1)

• Understand the organization’s position on the

environment and corporate social responsibility
• Understand the current internal IT situation by
assessing
– The Data Center
– Front Office
• Develop policies identifying what is to be done
for IT to support the organization
– Create and Protect Value
– Short- and Long-Term

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Codify Management’s Intent (2)

• Develop enterprise standards that factor green

requirements in
• Revise processes
• Implement metrics
• Revise Job Descriptions
– Define responsibilities and targets
– Tie compensation to targets
• Set the Tone From the Top

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Engage Stakeholders

• Engage stakeholders to understand their perspectives

• Implement teams, or formally delegate to existing teams
• Ensure the teams are exposed to new ideas
– Publications
– Training
– Conferences
• Internal Examples
– Build bridges with facilities if separate from IT
– Accounting
– Engineering
• External Examples
– Your energy utility
– Federal, state and municipal programs

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

Management Opportunities (1)
• Government initiatives
– Stay abreast of them
– Department of Energy
– Environmental Protection Agency
• Incentives from utilities
– Talk to your sales / account representative – they may have incentives
for the retirement of servers, etc.
– PG&E is offering $150-300 for each server removed due to virtualization
• Data Center Strategy
– Improve existing
– Build New
– Outsource
– Virtualized Data Centers
• Electricity is 3-4x more expensive in CT than in Idaho
• What about peak demand times in NYC vs off-peak in Tokyo?

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Management Opportunities (2)
• Review ITIL Capacity Management
– Capacity Management is tasked with providing IT resources to the organization
in a cost-effective manner.
– Need to factor green IT concepts in
• Planning for the Future
• Tracking Existing Use
– Need formal modeling of capacity requirements vs. ballpark estimates
– Too much capacity leads to inefficient power utilization
• True for UPSes, CRACs, etc
– Conduct Annual Power Assessments
• Review how power is being used
• Look for opportunities to improve
• Project Management
– Require that green requirements be identified in project requests
– Have green requirements reviewed approved appropriately

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

Management Opportunities (3)

• Purchasing / Hardware Engineering

– Set minimum standards at a policy level and identify standards for
purchasing of new hardware, facilities, etc.
• Financial Management
– Understand the electrical power costs to IT
• May need to be broken out from a larger site bill
– Track power consumption relative to IT services rendered
– What business units are consuming what amount of power totaling
what cost?
• Service Design
– Factor in energy costs (direct and indirect) as part of the design and
approval decision making

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Management Opportunities (4)
• Leverage and Trend Metrics
– Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
• PUE = Total Data Center Facility Power / IT Equipment Power
• Total Data Center Power includes everything – PDUs,
CRACs, IT Equipment, etc.
• IT Equipment Power is just computers, switches, network
gear, etc.
• Can use to calculate demands
– If PUE = 3 and new devices is 100 watts then total energy demands could be 3 x 100 = 300
watts total
– Data Center Effectiveness (DCE)
• 1/PUE or IT Equipment Power / Total Data Center Power
• Just a reciprocal but shows what amount of total power is
being used by the IT equipment

http://www.thegreengrid.org/gg_content/Green_Grid_Guidelines_WP.pdf

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

High-Level Technical Opportunities

On 7/21/08 – “Implementing a Green Data Center”

Will be more technical and focused on opportunities

within the data center to reduce energy consumption

http://solutions.internet.com/4991_default

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Technical Opportunities (1)
• 1 Watt IT Equipment Saved Reduces Cooling 1 Watt
– Savings on IT equipment can be a 2-for-1 gain
– Converse is true too – for each watt of IT equipment added, need to factor in a
watt for cooling (other areas need to be considered as well such as UPSes,
PDUs, etc.)
• Capital vs. Operating Expense
– Some cultures “run until things break”
• Some systems are 10-20 years old
– Older technology tends to be less energy efficient
– True for
• Servers – Can have dramatic savings considering low average
computational utilization to begin with
• Desktops – Reductions of over 50%
• UPSes – reduction of power loss of up to 70% over 15 year old systems1
• Chillers –Reductions of 50%1
• Etc.

1 The Green Data Center: Steps for the Journey. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4413.html

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation
Technical Opportunities (2)
• Old Desktop
– 200 watt PC + 80 watt 17” monitor = 280 watts
– 280 watts x 8,760 hrs/year (24x265) /1000 = 2,452 kw/hr per year
– 2,452 kw/hr x 9.53 cents/kw/hr = $233.51/year to operate
– Three years = $700.52
– Doesn’t include peripherals or cooling impacts
• Could easily grow to be $300-600/year
• New Desktop
– 100 watt PC + 30 watt for 17” LCD = 130 watts
– $108.41/year to operate
– Three years = $325.24
• Look at the age of systems and factor in the cost of powering them
along with traditional support costs of aging technology

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Technical Opportunities (3)

• Telecommuting and remote collaboration

– Let employees, vendors and customers work from home vs.
travel
• Review Thin Clients
– Cut down on desktop power consumption
– Better manage clients
• Consolidate where possible
– Some servers are utilized only 6% of potential but are still
consuming power via dedicated power supplies

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

Technical Opportunities (4)
• Virtualization
– Easy to add/remove servers
– Only power up what is needed
– Virtualize hosts or even the data center
• Data Center Design
– Set the temperature no colder than it needs to be (IBM says 72F /
22C)
– Clean out and organize cables under the raised floor
– Layout – use hot & cold aisles
– Properly layout cold tiles
– Close rack openings
– Insulation
– Replace old PDUs, Chillers, CRACs, etc.

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Technical Opportunities (5)
• Use Power Management Features
– Studies have shown that usage fluctuates on many systems but
power consumption does not – this tells us that existing power
management features are not being used
– Proper configuration can reduce power demands by 20%1
• Understand Redundancy Energy Costs of redundancy
– Redundant (N+1) systems – spares are consuming power if on
– Sometimes hot backups are needed, but not always
– Review if clusters / hot spares are always needed
• Monitor Power Use
– Monitor power to the rack level if possible
– Track and trend over time

1. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=295302

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

Technical Opportunities (6)

• Distributed Generation / On-site Generation

– Augmentation - Supply peak power
– Cover power loss from utility
– Re-sell power to the utility
– Technologies
• Geothermal
– Chena hot springs dropped kw/hr cost from $0.30 to $0.06
• Hydroelectric
• Solar power
• Wind Turbines

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Continuous Improvement
• The first step is only the
beginning of a journey
• Needs will change as
Where do we want to be? Vision and Objectives

technologies and the world

changes
• Leverage metrics where Where are we now? Audits / Assessments

possible to track status

• Conduct quarterly reviews of
progress How do we get to where Process Improvement
we want to be? (Leverage Best Practices)
• Maintain the tone from the top
• Formally schedule reviews to
assess the current state and
How do we monitor Metrics and Critical
look for new opportunities Progress? Success Factors

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Vik Chandra
Program Director - IBM Software Group Green
Market Management

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Software Enabled Opportunities for Energy Efficiency
Reduce commuting with Reduce business travel by
online collaboration and using online collaboration
increasing work from home

Comply with environmental

regulatory requirements People Shift workloads to
underutilized servers to
reduce energy and floor
space needs
Reduce use of paper by
enabling business processes
Schedule execution of
to use eForms and images
workload to off-peak hours to
use lower cost energy
Optimize business processes
to reduce energy footprint Optimize applications to
and costs of operations reduce needed IT resources
Workloads and energy

Turn the power down when

work (transactions) slows
down Consolidate and Virtualize to
eliminate floor space and
compute infrastructure

Optimize HVAC for hot spots

Compress your data to lower to reduce energy
storage and server needs consumption
Infrastructure

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

Cutting Costs and Carbon Emissions with IBM Software

42% of IBM’s employees do not regularly come into an office saving

$100M annually in real estate costs

A distributor saved $70k on one training event by avoiding travel

People

A financial services company reduced average process cycle time by

50%
IBM is consolidating 3900  33 System z servers providing an 80%
annual energy savings
Workloads

A financial institution achieved data compression rates of 83%

A university achieved 40 to 50% reduction in floor space, 30%

reduction in power and cooling costs

Infrastructure

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Resources (1)
• Mike Ebbers, Alvin Galea, Marc Tu Duy Khiem, and Michael Schaefer. “The Green Data Center –
Steps for the Journey” RedPaper Draft (June 2, 2008 Draft)
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4413.html

• US Department of Energy – Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/saveenergynow/partnering_data_centers.html

• DOE – Creating Energy Efficient Data Centers

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/saveenergynow/pdfs/doe_data_centers_presentation.pdf

• American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers – Technical Committee 9.9
http://tc99.ashraetcs.org/

• Creating the Green Data Center

http://www.adc.com

• The Data Center Journal

http://datacenterjournal.com/

• The Green Grid

http://www.thegreengrid.org

• Uptime Institute
http://www.uptimeinstitute.org/

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

 Resources (2)
• Simon Mingay. “10 Key Elements of a ‘Green IT’ Strategy”. Gartner. December 2007.

• Energy Information Administration. Electric Power Monthly

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html

• National Data Center Energy Efficiency Information Program

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/saveenergynow/pdfs/national_data_center_fact_sheet.pdf

• Lawrence Berkeley National Labs – Data Center Best Practices

http://hightech.lbl.gov/datacenters.html

• Kenneth G Brill. “Data Center Energy Efficiency and Productivity”. The Uptime Institute. 2007.
http://www.cio.co.uk/whitepapers/index.cfm?whitepaperid=4241

• Cogeneration & On-site Power Production

http://www.cospp.com

• US Department of Energy – Distributed Energy Program

http://www.eere.energy.gov/de/

• Chena Hot Springs Geothermal Project

http://www.yourownpower.com/

• State of California – Distributed Energy Resource Guide

http://www.energy.ca.gov/distgen/index.html

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

Thank you for the privilege of facilitating this webcast

George Spafford
[email protected]
http://www.pepperweed.com

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 Questions?

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 Follow up Webcast

On 7/21/08 – “Implementing a Green Data Center”

Will be more technical and focused on opportunities within the data

center to reduce energy consumption

http://solutions.internet.com/4991_default

© 2008 Jupitermedia Corporation

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