Did you Really Turn off the Lights?

DataCenterKnowledge has a post reporting on The Planet's efforts to really turn Lights off in the data center.

The Planet said today that it expects to reduce its annual energy consumption by 1.4 million kilowatt hours, gaining nearly $140,000 in savings, through “more efficient use of lighting.” Translation: they’re strictly enforcing a policy for turning out the lights after hours. That means The Planet’s six data centers will be lit only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with smaller lamps remaining on in main areas for safety and navigation. ”Data-center technicians who work around the clock now turn on lights as needed in computer rooms,” the company said. 

With many bragging about a Lights Out facility, you would think this isn't newsworthy, but many are not really turning off the lights.

“While lighting is a small portion of the total power usage of a datacenter, it can be often be safely reduced through mature, inexpensive technologies and designs,” according to data center energy management best practices from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which recommends using motion sensors to turn lights off in empty rooms.

Read more

Avanade's Anti-Greenwashing Initiative, Part 1

Avanade's Toby Velte is about to have a book published on Green IT.  Here is a link to the book on amazon.com.

"Green IT is a social imperative that meets the needs of business. This book guides organizations in applying environmentally sound practices to business and technology decisions--helping them reduce their consumption of resources, energy dependencies, and costs. These issues are real and the time to act is now." --Adam Warby, CEO, Avanade

After talking to Toby to understand his book and Avanade Tools.

Avanade has created a tool that uses more than 120 variables and real-world customer data to measure the concrete impact of Green IT projects for a customer. This deep ROI modeling tool measures the true impact that virtualization and data center optimization projects can have on costs, energy use, carbon footprint, etc.

I was thinking great I will write a blog entry. Where is your url for your Green IT initiative?  "Well, we don't have a place on our web site."  So, I can't actually link to anything on Avanade's web site.

Wait, you have a book, you have Green IT analysis tools, and you don't have a marketing site.  How can anyone claim what you are doing is greenwashing when you don't have a marketing initiative?  You are truly working on filtering the greenwash: anti-greenwashing.

Here is a sample screen shot from Toby's tool.

image

This screen is a sample of a virtualization calculation taking into account typical TCO costs, but adds specifics for kW/Hr and carbon footprint. Staring at these numbers Toby calculates data center facilities cost per sq ft. It would be more accurate to calculate the data facilities cost as a function of kW capacity.

It turns out Toby is going to be coming to meet with a software company in Redmond in two weeks, and I can meet with him face to face as my office is close to a Redmond software company too.

This is Part 1 of what I am sure will be another post after I meet with Toby and get a copy of his book.

Reduce the environmental and budgetary impact of your IT infrastructure

This groundbreaking work offers a complete roadmap for integrating environmentally sound techniques and technologies into your Information Systems architecture. Green IT explains how to adopt a business-driven green initiative and provides a detailed implementation plan. You will find strategies for reducing power needs, procuring energy from alternative sources, utilizing virtualization technologies, and managing sustainable development. Case studies highlighting successful green IT projects at major organizations are included. Keep your IT department and your organization in the green--both environmentally and financially--with help from this comprehensive guide.

  • Work within current global initiatives and standards for e-waste

  • Minimize power usage and use alternative cooling methods in your datacenter
  • Transition your office into a paperless environment
  • Equip your organization with green hardware, including EPEAT-, RoHS-, and ENERGY STAR-certified machines
  • Implement efficient datacenter design in terms of energy consumption, cooling, server configuration, consolidation, cabling, redundancy, and more
  • Virtualize servers and storage using the latest technologies from VMware, Microsoft, Compellent, Incipient, and others
  • Measure existing datacenter efficiency using current metrics, and track progress with Business Intelligence tools
  • Establish a green supply chain
  • Explore the Software as a Service (SaaS) model
  • Manage ongoing compliance and sustainable growth

I have a copy of the virtualization chapter, but I want to see what Toby has for his data center optimization advice.

Read more

Tip for Building Green Applications

I just had a conversation with an industry magazine editor and had a good time discussing green IT. One of the topics we talked about was green applications, and how difficult it is to get developers to write greener code.  There are no hard and fast rules as to what code is greener, but after the discussion it hit me there is one way to make a greener app.

Problem: Developers are removed from the production environment and the resources used. As CapEx and OpEx increase for power and cooling infrastructure developers are unaware that their energy use is a dominant cost beyond the cost of the hardware.

Opportunity: How do you get software developers to change their behavior?

Solution: If you use cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services or Google Application Engine, then the costs for compute, storage, and network use are easy to calculate as this is their chargeback model. As the application is developed, tested and put into production, the costs for running the solution is a metered number that has a direct relationship to the code.

Give your developers a cost per unit of work budget. If you are a startup you have limited budget and if you are trying to run a site where advertising is one of your main revenue streams, your profit will be determined by the difference between your revenue and your costs. The last thing you want is a site that costs more to run per click event than an advertising revenue click brings in.

This applies to few of the enterprise developers, but more and more companies are starting up using AWS and GAE, training a set of developers who are learning to be efficient with compute, storage, and network.  Do you think these developers waste storage and network bandwidth needlessly moving data around?

If you could build an internal chargeback system for compute, storage, and network, charging the departments direct costs, then you too can motivate your developers.

If you think it is too much work for you to build your own system, here is a more radical idea, use AWS or GAE as your development environment, and you can roll out the production system in your own environment, but you used AWS/GAE to measure your solution and you outsourced the development environment. The guys at Skytap could support this model if they make changes to their chargeback model.

This is a good opportunity for the management tools companies like CA, HP, and IBM to support as well.

Read more

Example of a Green Strategy Implemented Grass Roots vs. Management Edict

Purchasing.com has an article about Seattle Children's Hospital grass roots based Green procurement initiative.

Sustainable procurement at Seattle Children's Hospital is the outgrowth of a grassroots, voluntary program that began in various pockets of the hospital several years ago, and which were then eventually coordinated.

“Our goal is to become the Greenest hospital in the U.S.,” says Dennis Gawlik, who is responsible for non-clinical sourcing at the Seattle-based facility. Gawlik is no novice, either. He is a member of the ISM Committee on Sustainability and Social Responsibility, and teaches at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, which offers an MBA in sustainable business and weaves sustainability through all its courses, Gawlik says.

The end results they admit are slower.

Seattle Children's strategy, according to Gawlik, is an admittedly slower, more organic way of getting into Green procurement, but he believes it tends to build more short-term and long-term commitment, because it is based on a “pull” model from users, rather than a “push” model from a procurement or management mandate.

And contrasts the way the majority of people have chosen to implement Green procurement.

Many companies take one of two strategies in launching a Green procurement initiative. Either purchasing takes the lead and directs internal customers on how to be more environmentally friendly in product selection, or management issues a Green mandate and purchasing develops its portion of the overall corporate strategy. Both strategies can work well, but in both cases, the internal customers often feel left out of the decision-making process.

However, there is a third strategy that may, in the long run, lead to the most successful and long-term results. This involves the procurement department piggybacking on existing internal Green initiatives, but is driven by the internal customers first, rather than a mandate. A good example of this strategy has been taking place at Seattle Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center, which has a very strong commitment to Green procurement.

The article has logical steps on how Seattle Children's Hospital put their program in place and there are good words of advice for those of you considering how to integrate Green into your data center purchasing.

Read more

Who is Reading Green Data Center Blog?

The following is a list of top 25 companies reading the Green Data Center blog in order of highest to lowest.  I have not included hits from broadband provides like Comcast, Verizon, Charter Communications, etc, even though there may be some traffic from those companies corporate offices.

The list is based on Google Analytics stats from July 8 – Aug 7.

1. Microsoft

2. VMware

3. Cisco

4. Hewlett Packard

5. Intel

6. Performance Systems International

7. Sun Microsystems

8. IBM

9. DPR Construction

10. Google

11. Amazon

12. Ebay

13. University of Cambridge Laboratory

14. Apple Computer

15. Liebert

16. SAP

17. Computer Sciences Corp

18. Data General

19. Lockheed Martin

20. APC

21. Dell

22. Deutsche Bank

23. Executive Software

24. Oak Ridge Laboratories

25. AOL

Reflecting on this list, I know someone at 15 of the companies, and helps me think of who my readers are.

Read more