This article was submitted by Sumit Datta, HCL Techologies India. Articles can be submitted by using this link.
Why should your IT go Green
Rising global warming, increased energy costs and greater awareness about its socio-economic implications has forced organizations to look for ways to reduce their carbon-emission footprint. However, what has escaped attention is the massive amount of energy your IT consumes. Enterprise IT, which accounts for up to 40 percent of an organization’s energy requirement, has a big role to play to reduce greenhouse gases. According to a Forrester survey, over 41 percent of people in the IT departments believe energy efficiency and equipment recycling are important factors that need to be considered. In the same survey, 65 percent believed reduction of energy related operating costs as the driving factor for implementing Green IT.

Data center – Energy guzzlers
While at it, let’s identify which part of your IT you should focus on to reduce energy consumption. Undoubtedly, data centers have the maximum energy requirements, given the massive number of powerful servers that are housed in today’s data centers, which are sometimes as big as the size of a football field. And these data centers may require as much cooling power as the electricity to run them. Some studies say that these data centers account for between 1.2 and 2.0 percent of electricity consumed in the United States. It is also a known fact that many of the servers in the data centers run at a low utilization level of 10% to 15%. This causes significant wastage through redundant hardware, memory, network devices and power supplies. In earlier times, enterprises would have put up with this excess capacity, given the IT department’s risk-aversion. However, with maturing IT coupled with need to rein-in energy use, organizations are now forced to adopt strategies to reduce their data center operational costs.

Strategies to implement Green IT
So, what are the steps you should take to optimize the consumption of electricity as well as reduce the number of servers in your data center? Enterprise IT groups are looking at various options – such as PC Power management software and deployment of energy efficient servers and network devices. However, these piecemeal steps will not yield the desired results; you need a more holistic approach to solve this problem. The answer lies in the adoption of Cloud computing and Virtualization within your enterprise IT – two strategies that can a go a long way in reducing your energy-dependency and thus make your organization truly green.

Embrace Cloud Computing
Cloud computing lets you use computational power and storage space from a third-party service provider, thus lowering demand for addition of more servers in your data center. You can also reduce the number of applications deployed on your data centers by using similar applications hosted by SaaS providers. Now, cloud computing means different things to different people – depending upon which vendor you talk to. Therefore, it could be utility computing or grid or Software-as-a-Service or even Platform-as-a-Service. However, one thing is clear – all of them refer to some service provided by a third-party provider outside the corporate firewall. It is true there are concerns with respect to security, availability and customer’s data privacy in these services – as shown recently by the outage at Amazon’s S3 storage service. However, these issues will get addressed as the technology and industry matures.

There are primarily two types of cloud services, namely Infrastructure in the cloud and Applications in the cloud. Infrastructure in the cloud refers to raw CPU power and data storage space you can use on-demand over Internet. Amazon’s S3 and Elastic Compute services fall under this category. Therefore, the next time your engineering design team asks for additional capacity to run a simulation or your finance group wants to perform a credit analysis, don’t jump to buy the new hardware. Instead, reach out to these infrastructure service providers and use their capacity in a pay-as-you-use model. This approach also works well when your resource requirements are elastic in nature – the hardware requirement expands and shrinks over a period of time depending upon various factors (such as during life-span of an experimental project, cyclical number of user visits in an Online site etc) . It frees you from procuring costly hardware in-house and then letting it remain idle most of the time.

You should also explore Applications in the cloud type of services as a tool to minimize data center load. Look at business applications that are not critical to your business or those you can’t afford to maintain with a separate IT group in-house – such as CRM apps, HR/HCM, Backup and Restore, Security etc. Instead of running these applications on your data center, you should consider using applications provided by third-party service providers. This, in turn, reduces the number of servers in your data center – which means you have less energy consumption.

Virtualize Data Center
As you look for ways to optimize your data center operation, consolidation of servers through Virtualization technology provides considerable energy savings. Virtualization is a technology that allows you to partition a physical hardware into multiple logical boxes, with each having its own operating system and network connectivity running in a sandbox. This makes additional standby servers redundant since you can dynamically provision a new virtual machine and then run a new instance of your application on this VM. With advances in virtual machine technology, you can now move a running virtual machine from one server to another server. This further increases the utilization rate of your server stack in the data center; hence you can host more applications with reduced number of servers.