The word on everyone’s lips these days seems to be ‘green’ and while the pressure for businesses to reduce their impact on the environment can only be a good thing, try explaining that to the IT departments who seem to be bearing the brunt of this pressure.

“To be fair, when you have a department that is responsible for running huge data centres full of storage and servers which constantly consume energy to keep them powered and cooled, it’s no wonder that they are feeling the heat,” remarks Mark Nutt, a partner at business and IT consultancy Morse.

There are many reasons that the demands to go green have grown, from outside pressure to simple in-house cost issues.

“It is now widely recognised that the rate of growth in the corporate data centre’s requirement for power is simply insupportable,” Bob Miller, ceo of ONStor highlights. “Already in many cases the traditional capital costs associated with high tech equipment housed within data centres is being outstripped by the sheer cost of the electricity it consumes – the consumption of not just banks of servers, storage devices etc but by the supporting equipment needed for power conversion, UPS, air con and increasingly liquid cooling. As the price of energy has increased so has Board level interest.”

“Green initiatives are sweeping the IT industry with pressure groups such as the Green Grid now taking centre stage in an industry renowned for its power consumption.  Whilst the vendors appear to be taking this issue seriously the overall end user community is some way behind.”

Worryingly, a report by Global Action Plan with guidance from the Environmental IT Leadership Team (EILT) has revealed that 86 per cent of ICT departments surveyed do not know the carbon footprint of their activities and less than 20 per cent even see their energy bills. These figures show that IT departments need to become more proactive in seeing how they work, and also push to get more support from above for sustainable green IT strategies.

But the key for IT managers is to be positive about going green. Sure, there are barriers and issues to overcome, however it is possible for IT departments to go green without awfully high costs.  

“Businesses are being bombarded with new ‘green IT’ products from vendors which cost money that the business and IT department cannot justify spending when they already have devices that work perfectly fine,” notes Nutt. “While this can seem like a no-win situation, businesses shouldn’t feel like going green means waving goodbye to the IT budget. There are practical steps that can be taken in order to become more environmentally friendly that doesn’t involve ripping and replacing the entire infrastructure and don’t have to cost the earth.”

Green IT is more about an approach or strategy rather than spending copious amounts of budget on a green-labelled product. In reality, green solutions aren’t typically more expensive than non-green ones, and in many cases they are actually lower cost.

“The real cost comes from things such as including green awareness in the purchasing process,” explains Ian Kilpatrick, chairman of the Wick Hill Group. “If issues such as comparative power usage, expected lifespan, recycling, etc. are included in tenders and as part of the general IT purchasing process, then it is possible to identify, at a glance, whether, for example, two similarly priced products will cost the same over time. This is particularly important at a point where energy costs are rapidly rising.”

Global Action Plan’s report showed that over 60 per cent of respondents consider time pressures and cost the biggest barriers to adopting sustainable IT policies, and believe that recognised standards and tax allowances would provide the most valuable support towards reducing IT’s contribution to the UK’s carbon emissions.

“Awareness is now growing but to turn this into action, IT departments need help,” says Trewin Restorick, director of Global Action Plan and chair of the EILT. “They need vendors to give them better information rather than selling green froth, they need Government policies to become more supportive and less contradictory, and they need more support from within their organisations.”

Tom Kelly, managing director for Logicalis UK agrees that legislation and tax incentives are important, but, first and foremost, businesses must evaluate the efficiency of existing IT infrastructure, citing server under-utilisation and the data centre as prime examples of energy abuse.

“The government’s draft climate change bill proposes a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2050. In this environment, a flabby business that guzzles budget and energy is likely to be a prime target for impending legislation,” he says.

“Cios have a responsibility to ensure their IT infrastructure can support a lean and dynamic business, yet as this survey demonstrates, many departments are unsure if and how they can maximise their existing assets. With data centre capacity at a premium, and energy bills escalating, cios are well advised to look inward for energy saving initiatives and to instigate cultural change throughout the business. In short, efficient IT equals green IT.”

Other so called ‘costs’ to going green involve creating a departmental culture change. This isn’t a simple thing to do, but it will help make the green move more successful.

“There’s a significant culture change and time investment required around analysing data and making decisions on the best and most environmentally sound ways of storing it. While it might be appropriate to keep the most current, frequently changing data on on-line primary disk, other information can be stored off-line on more power efficient media or even deleted if it is duplicated or no longer needed. It’s a little like households being prompted to separate their waste between recyclable and non-recyclable items,” notes Ryan Witt, senior vice president, sales and marketing at BridgeHead Software.

Now it’s clear that the costs aren’t insurmountable, IT departments can look at the ways that they can begin to go green. The main focus should be on becoming more energy efficient. There are three areas that will likely need improvement, David Galton-Fenzi, group sales director at Zycko notes.

“There are three main areas starting with environmental inefficiency - data centre equipment wasting energy and expelling it as heat, causing even more energy being expended to cool it down again,” he says.

“Then there is power inefficiency – power being taken from the mains and being converted into different types of power (different voltage, AC/DC). This causes power to be lost at each conversion.

“Finally there is technological inefficiency – underutilised servers pumping out heat continuously, underutilised storage devices running continuously, irrelevant of whether it is necessary, and fans being used to expel the heat generated by these inefficiencies.”

Paul Phillips, regional director, UK and Ireland at Extreme Networks continues with his own advice for IT managers; “Include green in their decision making criteria and TCO models. Saving power through reducing power consumption by using more power efficient equipment, powering down unused POE (power over Ethernet) ports (such as used in a contact centre out of hours) combined with the reduced need for cooling not only makes commercial sense but also saves the planet.”

Indeed, the focus on green IT shouldn’t be just within the main body of the IT department, it needs to work to change the culture of the whole business, making sure all staff do their part too. Using technology in better ways i.e. audio and videoconferencing rather than travelling to meetings and using mobile communications technology more productively lowers carbon footprints, time and cost loses, and energy costs can be lowered by using equipment only when necessary etc, and turning off machines when not in use or at the end of every day.

You can even get solutions that override the human factor, and do such things automatically.

”PC power management is one area where companies can achieve easy, ‘quick wins’ in terms of reducing their environmental impact,” notes 1E’s vp of energy solutions, Simon Francis. “1E’s own NightWatchman solution, for example, allows PCs to be automatically switched off overnight and at weekends, combining significant energy savings with accurate reporting and typically paying for itself within the first year.”

Greener practices can help save money, win business, enhance reputation and make you more efficient, so the benefits far outweight the costs, with the majority of these costs incurred being made back by the business in a matter of years or even months.

 “No-one will argue that making changes to reduce a business’ impact on the environment isn’t a good thing. However, the days of being able to say that making these changes is simply too hard or expensive are gone. By incorporating these steps into an assessment based framework to understand the organisations’ current state of energy efficiency readiness and desired financial, environmental and operational outcomes, businesses can integrate green IT into their IT strategy without having to worry about spending vast sums of money. In fact, by making better use of existing IT assets, changing the procurement model for IT and reducing power consumption, organisations can make a positive impact on the environment whilst actually reducing their IT costs and increasing infrastructure flexibility,” Nutt concludes.