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Is the green revolution on hold?
07 June 2009
The first casualties of a recession are the ‘nice to have' elements of a business, the things that drop down the agenda faster than a stone as managing operational costs becomes the prevailing concern. There is a fear that green IT and reducing carbon emissions could fall over the same precipice, but there is a counter argument that they should be integral to cost-cutting strategies. Go green and save money along the way.
Bruno Zago, HP's environmental manager for Britain and Ireland, said that the importance of environmental issues in a buying decision would be weighted at around 5-10 per cent by most companies.
He said repeated surveys show that most consumers are not prepared to pay more for products that are better for the environment and believes the same would apply to businesses. But if green initiatives are suddenly linked to saving money, then the weighting will jump up and customers will suddenly be interested.
The business case is simple, according to Zago.
"The environment is not at the forefront of business people's minds and you will only get a customer to invest in green IT if they can see a financial incentive to do so."
All of this comes into sharp focus in the data centre where the presence of more energy-efficient hardware ticks both boxes.
In Ireland, where the high cost of electricity always puts us in the top three most expensive countries in Europe, there is a real need to run the IT estate more efficiently from a power perspective.
This is where environmentally friendly hardware is gaining some traction with finance directors who want to see a clear return on investment rather than cosy notions of doing the right thing for the planet. The reality is that companies will not pay a premium for green IT. As Dell can testify, businesses won't even buy into the total cost of ownership argument.
"A few years ago, our energy-efficient products came with a price premium but, because they had lower voltage processors and other power-saving technologies, we could show there was a return and a saving on the investment in the long run," said Dermot O'Connell, general manager of Dell Ireland.
"But customers were more worried about their short-term budgets and would go for cheaper products rather than the longer-term return."
The big sea change is that all the developments around power-saving technologies have since been incorporated into servers, PCs and laptops, part of next-generation specifications that come with the natural cycle of a hardware refresh and not as an extra cost.
Energy-saving features have become as integral to the manufacturer's pitch as processing speeds, and most of them have online energy calculators that help potential customers identify the scope for long-term savings. Customers are now ready to have the discussion, according to O'Connell. "In the last year we have noticed that when we go in to see IT departments, they get out their power bills."
He gave a compelling example of the kind of savings that can be made around the total cost of ownership of servers in a data centre. "One of our customers is a reasonably large data centre in the United States. It had 336 servers that were now three generations old. By replacing them with our modern blade servers, the data centre was able to make a saving of $839,000 on an investment of $139,000."
The sums are not always as convincing, but sometimes this is the fault of the users. Bruno Zago argued that manufacturers had made huge strides in their product development and it was time for the customers to play their part.
"It has become a given that we make the hardware as energy-efficient as possible. The next piece has to be about educating the customers because we ship PCs out in the most energy-efficient settings and people change them without thinking about the impact."
There are various tools that allow power usage and settings to be controlled centrally, automatically determining switch off times and deleting power-hungry screen savers - HP hardware ships with Veridiam, an application that can be used to invoke default rules for the entire desktop estate. "We have made the power supplies as efficient as possible. The rest is down to education and user awareness," said Zago.
Dell's Dermot O'Connell echoed the idea that better management procedures play an important part in energy efficiency. "Quite often you can achieve a lot by adjusting settings on equipment you already have. There are all sorts of clever policies around systems which are not being adapted as much as they could be," he said. "We recently went in to Dublin Airport Authority and set the power controls differently, using Active Directory to enforce a policy across all their systems. It made a huge difference."
As a customer service, Del l will spend a couple of days carrying out a power assessment across a customer's PC estate. O'Connell said it is a relatively small investment to make that can be paid back within a month.
International sustainability programmes and eco labelling all help get the message across and educate end users, but there is a feeling that they do a better job for consumers than business customers when it comes to benchmarking energy-efficient products.
White goods are well labelled and categorised, while there is still some debate in Europe about the way IT products are presented. Most manufacturers use ratings set out by Energy Star to benchmark their products, a US government programme set up encourage energy savings.
"We do need a simplified and universally accepted rating system for the EU," said Dell's Dermot O'Connell. He also stressed the importance of other aspects of green IT, reducing packaging at the point of shipment and recycling products at the end of their life.
"Dell has invested a lot in the end-to-end lifecycle of products, from raw materials that go into its build, right through to its disposal. And we have a target to reduce packaging, saving $8m, which equates to preserving 150,000 trees. Styrofoam is also being replaced with corrugated cardboard which is much more eco-friendly."
On the front line of IT services, a company like Datapac is well positioned to gauge customer attitudes to the green IT messages that vendors are sending out.
"Every aspect of IT is suffering at the moment, so it's a question of how primary green IT was in the first place," said Edel Creely, managing director. "Green IT by itself has not been a factor in making businesses look at investing in technology. It's al l about saving money on energy and reducing costs."
She said the argument becomes blurred because energy saving has always been an issue and there is a general recognition that the implementation of new technologies will save money, particularly around consolidation, whether of servers or printers.
"Consolidation of anything will reduce energy costs ...When you reduce the number of printers you are also going to save money," she said.
Managed print services are another way for companies to score an easy win, according to HP's Bruno Zago." When you realise that it takes ten times more energy to make a sheet of paper than to print on one, it makes you understand that you have to be more responsible.
"The potential savings around paper and energy are huge and can best be achieved by removing desktop printers and centralising the infrastructure with fewer machines."
The willingness of companies to embrace these ideas depends on what Accenture describes as the IT maturity of an organisation. According to Aidan Gregan, senior executive at Accenture in Ireland, the more mature companies instil environmentally friendly strategies into their management, making it a key part of their corporate and social responsibility.
"They will have people in the organisation who are responsible for driving the sustainability and green agenda, and they would work closely with the IT finance people because they are trying to bring both agendas together."
Gregan said it had to be an enterprise-wide commitment to the green idea, involving everyone, from facilities to procurement.
The most mature organisations may also look at their supply chain and expect partners to pursue a similar strategy.
"In Ireland there are not many organisations at this point, but we have seen some positive signs in the last month that suggest there is clear ownership of the sustainability agenda in a lot of companies. We are certainly up to speed with most countries when it comes to green IT."
How green is your data centre?
The data centre was the first part of the IT estate to fall under the green spotlight, not least because server racks and cooling systems are a massive drain on power. For an organisation looking for energy efficiencies, it is the place to make some early wins with basic steps in power consumption made easy by a new generation of hardware.
For third-party data centres, which make it their business to host other people's infrastructure, the importance of being green is now less important than being efficient. Tanya Duncan, general manager of Interxion Ireland, a data centre in Dublin's Parkwest Business Park, has seen customer questions change with the onset of the recession.
"We used to get asked about the efficiencies around technology, but now the questions are all about cost, as companies want to make tangible savings. Green is less of a priority, but the two are intrinsically linked; they are one and the same, but there is no doubt that the starting point in the discussion is about efficiency and the money we can save them."
Interxion is a signed-up member of the Green Grid, a consortium of leading IT vendors focused on making the data centres more efficient, but Duncan wants to see standards introduced that make it easier for customers to determine the real benefits of each facility.
"We invest so much in infrastructure that we would like to promote it to our customers in a way that makes it easy to compare different data centres. There is no way of gauging it at the moment," she said.
The best way is to calculate power usage efficiency, said Duncan, a simple measurement whereby you take the data centre energy usage and divide it by the energy usage of the IT equipment. "It is not openly discussed and advertised, so there is no way of directly comparing one data centre with another, but it is one way of doing it," she said.
She warned, however, that investing in more energy-efficient infrastructure was only part of the solution and stressed the importance of a well engineered data centre that is managed effectively.
To minimise the power overhead, for example, a green data centre should never be over-specified for the task it performs. "You can invest millions in green technology, but the data centre still has to be operated properly," she said.
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