Going Green in IT
| Date | 01 February 2012 |
| Author | Sudip Banerjee |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00144.x |
| Published date | 01 February 2012 |
Going Green in IT
Sudip Banerjee
Former CEO of L&T Infotech
2012 may not be that far away for those who believe in
the Mayan calendar and believe that the world is really
going to end. For others, however, who believe that life
will go on, we must still face the fact that we are sitting
on a ticking time bomb.
It goes without saying that the information revolution
has brought us considerable technological advances.
Unfortunately, it has also brought a new range of envi-
ronmental threats, through consumption and pollution
of natural resources and through the amount of waste
and by-products generated. According to recent
research, the global carbon dioxide emissions of the IT
industry are equal to those of the airline industry. Collec-
tively, we need to take sustainable actions to tackle this
man-made menace.
The IT industry consumes energy and leaves a carbon
footprint across six major areas:
1. electricity for PCs, peripherals, printers, etc;
2. electricity for lighting of buildings and workplaces;
3. cooling requirements for buildings and workplaces;
4. running and maintaining data centres;
5. running and maintaining telecom infrastructure
devices; and
6. increasing travel for industry workers.
At the same time as the industry has become environ-
mentally aware, rising energy costs and the resultant
higher costs of utilities have affected the bottom line of
many organisations. The good news is that organisa-
tions, governments and states have identified these
threats and are actively working towards better models
of business that are economically viable and environ-
mentally sustainable. Among them, IT executives have
realised the need to adopt better, more sustainable
models of energy consumption, not only for a greener
and better future, but also to reduce costs and improve
profitability.
In the context of making business more environmen-
tally friendly and sustainable, many models have been
proposed. In the IT industry, ‘Green IT’ is one such
model. It involves managing the entire IT ecosystem,
comprising IT innovators, suppliers and consumers, in a
sustainable fashion. It encompasses various ideas
and practices, from implementing ‘green data cen-
tres’ and ‘energy optimisation’ to building ‘green
buildings’ and ‘technology parks’. I will examine these
practices in turn.
Green data centres
The amount of electricity needed to power and cool the
data centre makes it one of the costliest aspects of the
IT organisation. Data centres have two aspects: (1) facility
maintenance (i.e. factors such as cooling and space); and
(2) hardware (i.e. disks and storage mediums).
The amount of data storage needed by Fortune 500
companies has increased exponentially over the last dec-
ade. Newer forms of data such as media (e.g., pictures,
videos) are increasingly forming part of the data needs
of such organisations. These forms, though crucially
important, tend to be larger and require larger storage
spaces. This increases the cost of the data centres, in
terms of both the facility and the hardware.
The International Data Corporation states that raw
storage growth is approaching a 60 per cent com-
pounded annual growth rate. Historically, servers con-
sumed more power than storage; recently, however, this
trend has changed due to two factors:
1. Storage technology is limited by hard disk drives that
have been evolving more slowly than server technol-
ogy, so the number of drives per server is growing.
2. Organisations are storing more information than ever
before, due to increased business continuity require-
ments, which call for the replication of data to protect
against system, site or regional failures; the growing
trend to leverage a great variety of information for
business operations; and increasing compliance regu-
lations which require retaining company information.
Over the last five years, the number of servers able to fit
in one rack has increased, along with the amount of
electricity consumed by each server. In order to reduce
energy consumption and associated energy costs, IT
executives can improve the cooling configuration in data
centres by identifying and eliminating ‘hot spots’ and
energy leaks. For the reasons above, it is imperative that
data centres should be operated in an economically and
ecologically sustainable manner. The following tactics
can be used to reduce data centre energy consumption
effectively:
Global Policy Volume 3 . Issue 1 . February 2012
Global Policy (2012) 3:1 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00144.x ª2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Practitioner Commentary
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