Pooja Sharma

New Delhi
25 February 2008

Enough has been written about the need to adopt green IT. But why should partners recommend it to their customers? Will the adoption of green IT mean a higher IT budget? If this is the question plaguing you then the next pages are the answer you are looking for.

At an offhand conversation with your clients the latter is bound to touch upon wanting his company's report card (balance sheet, profit and loss account in this case) look good. Then you move onto chatting about newer areas of expansion, adopting newer technologies, investments have all been jotted down.

Chances are somewhere your advice will be asked on areas to maximize chances of scoring an excellent percentage (read profitability). One suggestion you can then consider offering is asking your client to switch to Green IT.

This is the latest buzzword in the IT industry. And if you thought that the much-hyped jargon is only about additional costs and serving the environmental concerns, think again.

But it is natural that while venturing such options you would want to have all the facts on how the switchover to Green IT will help your client. Well, wonder no more. This is where you get your gyan about Green IT, its business benefits and how vendors are trying to popularize the concept.

Know Your Greens
As definitions go, IDC says that Green IT is all about “the design, manufacture, deployment, and recycling of IT products and related materials in an environmentally responsible manner.” But vendors say that this single sentence does not do enough justice to the concept per se.

According to Jyoti Satyanathan, VP-Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia Green IT is an initiative through which customers are going to use lesser power to deliver the same results. “It is about energy efficiency and there is a corporate social responsibility attached to it as well,” he noted.

For Maia, a company that manufactures videoconferencing tools and products, Green IT has two aspects. One aspect is that components (semi conductor, plastic cover, casing etc) being used in IT products today are not recyclable. Thus, Green IT in the first place is about manufacturing components that are environment friendly.

The other aspect is that the kind of application they create for customers should make the environment safer. So using the video communication product can be environment friendly as by using the videoconferencing products, a person travels less and by thus helps conserve energy.

Definitions aside, at the end of the day every company looks forward to the business benefits they get when they plan out their investments. Adopting Green IT will eventually lead to a number of such benefits both in the short term as well as in the long run. To make it simpler, 'Save today, Invest in tomorrow.'

A company can reduce carbon emissions, conserve power and hence lower its running cost and eventually the total cost of ownership by including such products and components in its infrastructure that are essential for running and managing an enterprise. So starting with the desktops and notebooks to the networking products to servers and for that matter even the chips and processors that go into each of these machines, at every step the company can deploy and make use of products that are green.

This aside adopting technologies and solutions like server virtualization and server consolidation can help it save power and be more energy efficient. So, whatever it invests in (in the form of components, servers, machines and other ICTs), can be recovered over a long term in the form of savings made on electricity bills.

Recycling Taken Care Of
What more, these products are environment friendly and hence can takes care of your recycling problem. In India, companies do not get the permission from the government to recycle components that contain hazardous substances. This means you end up piling the load in your backyard or dump the same illegally. The sensible way out is having the green components right away so that in future you can get rid of the problem itself. Running your business at a low cost also implies that you will be able to have more machines installed and increase your work capability and thereby profitability.

Predominantly, Green IT has been all about power conservation with regard to data centers and servers. But other than technologies like server virtualization and consolidation that are widely used while designing a date center, a huge difference can be made by deploying such products within your IT set-up that is made up of components that are essentially Green. Vendors across the IT industry have gauged the need to be environmentally responsible and reducing cost by being energy efficient.

According to sources, 40 percent of energy goes into cooling alone, in a data center. A company can't compromise on the server, because they need the server and for that matter even the other smaller components cannot be done away with because they are critical in the functioning of the server. In such a scenario, the biggest scope to save energy is in cooling. Also, if the servers are generating less heat, you can do with less air conditioning and hence save power.

Again, in a country like India shortage and continuity of power supply is a huge problem and cost of power always tops the list of concerns. “We are second or third most expensive in terms of providing the power to the industries. In such a scenario, the customer demands a system that can save a lot of power and consequently lower their energy bills and here is where Green IT can make a huge difference,” noted Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power (India).

Blade Helps, But Not Much
An IT manager will never want his data center or the server room to be down at the cost of being energy efficient. No matter how much power it consumes or how critical the design of the data center is, the system should be reliable and the network should never collapse.

However, with the advent of blade servers, this problem was solved to a larger extent. Companies were able to place a number of blade servers and stack it up in one rack itself, as it required less space.

Hence, they could achieve the computing capacity they wanted to. Enterprises started consolidating and started building bigger server rooms, bigger data centers and gradually Blade servers became the best and most viable option, keeping in mind the space consideration.

But again there are some limitations with blade servers. While, they take up lesser space and meet your computation requirement, as a side effect they generate a lot of heat. For instance, the one rack that earlier used to generate 2-3 kilo watt of heat in a data center, will now generate 4-5 kilo watt and might even exceed the 10-15kilowatt mark.

Besides, the cooling requirements of different racks differ, depending upon the heat generated by them. Increasing the cooling capacity will no way help the cause as it's implications would be that you may end up using more power and feeding more energy

and there is every chance that even the cooling unit will start emitting SO2 and other gases in the environment.

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