Selling the environment

• Going Green
• Is legislation required?
• Environmental considerations
• Putting things in perspective
• Changing habits

Environmental considerations

The final part of the equation, refurbishment and recycling of old equipment, was the first to get serious attention but deployment has also gained major traction now with the rapid adoption of server consolidation strategies including virtualisation.

Pre-sale assessment is the least developed of the three-pronged attack on reducing environmental impact but it is an area starting to be addressed. HP's Ron De Kok is a specialist in this field.

"I get involved when a customer decides there is an issue within their datacentre, whether it's a heating problem or they are just using a lot more power than they would like to," he said. "Reducing that power usage will save them money but an attractive bi-product of that is becoming greener."

On many occasions, De Kok said a basic analysis of how equipment was laid out can start to alleviate problems.

"This might be where equipment is placed, how it is racked, how it is positioned against cooling units or how floor tiles are placed to allow cool air into the racks," he said. "We simply inform them that they need to close-up the gaps within and between racks to prevent hot air from the back coming back through the front and make sure racks are perpendicular to coolers so hot air has the best chance of returning to the cooler for extraction.

"Quite often IT managers go around looking for hotspots and simply place more cooling grills in the floor in the hope that will fix the problem. Sometimes they will put them in the hot aisles, which are meant to be hot.

"We can do a thermal analysis of the datacentre that maps exactly where the hot air is, where the cool is, airflow under the floor and return air coming back to the air-conditioning system. Then we can plan some scenarios based on how positioning racks in different places or adding additional cooling systems would affect the current environment."

While such detailed power and cooling analysis might sound like an enterprise play, De Kok suggested most of the work he had done in this area to date was for fairly small companies with 5-10 racks in their datacentre.

"Within an office environment, the biggest issue is often trying to get more power for their systems through the building grid. This is usually quite difficult or expensive," he said. "Increasing cooling capacity is also expensive so if there's any opportunity to simply reorganise equipment then customers are definitely willing to explore those possibilities."

Ethan Group has established a separate division to handle green computing that works with CIOs to baseline their carbon footprint including everything from IT usage to office lighting. At the end of the assessment, the customer is offered a range of alternatives with different price tags that will reduce their footprint by varying amounts. Organisations in NSW that want to be carbon neutral are offered the opportunity to offset whatever is left via the state's Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme.

"But this whole process isn't cheap because the consultants cost a lot of money," Ethan's Shadi Haddad said. "Unless a CIO is really pressed to do something like this and develop a policy, nine times out of 10 they will say no."

Dimension Data is working on environmental issues with a couple of its key vendors and has just been on the road pitching the concept to CIOs.

"It's about doing assessment of current state and building it into the current agenda because they are looking at things like consolidation and virtualisation anyway," Dimension Data's Gerard Florian said. "As part of those discussions we are also trying to understand some basic operations. If I have made an investment in infrastructure I don't have to go and throw it all away tomorrow, as much as everybody might like that to be the outcome, because there are things that can be done to change practices.

"There's a whole separate discussion based on telepresence, remote access and working from home. Again, you are not going to put a whole business case together based on the green issue but factoring in some of those parts has a green benefit and it's great not to be sitting in traffic at 8am on Monday morning."

Astron Technology's John Deacon said consolidation was an ideal starting point because a lot of clients had already gone down that path or were about to. He said this provided an opportunity to find out where clients were at in terms of power and cooling.

"They want to factor [environmental considerations] in if it can be done inside the current business plan. If not, they want to know how much it is going to cost to get there," he said.

While many CIOs wanted to do the right thing, Haddad said they often found it difficult to reap the rewards of changing irresponsible behaviour. A classic example was convincing users to turn PCs off when they go home at the end of the day - something many had traditionally been reluctant to do because they didn't want to wait for their machines to boot up when they arrive back in the office the following morning. Turning those PCs off generates savings but how does a CIO pull those savings back from an office manager that is working to separate budgets?

"That's a big issue. The wars used to be between the voice and data guys but now we are past that and they are all happy campers. The next big battle is CIO versus facilities management," Florian agreed. "FMs traditionally own power and are now pushing back on requests when CIOs ask for more. Alternatively, the power bill has crossed the border and CIOs suddenly need to work out how they manage it. There's an interesting dynamic building out there."