Adopting 'green by design'

Johannesburg, 03 Jul 2009

IT architects should always design their solutions with greener perspectives in mind, according to Paul Wandrag, senior strategy advisory consultant at Microsoft SA.

Wandrag will speak at the ITWeb Green Summit, on 18 August, at The Forum in Bryanston. The summit will examine how to deploy a green IT strategy that will transform IT and data centres into more cost-effective and environmentally-conscious operations.

He says by the time an over-engineered IT solution which is not green hits the data centre floor, there is little that can be done to make it green.

“I have not seen much on architecting greener solutions, most of the focus I have seen centres on the physical IT world and the energy consumption of IT,” he adds.

Wandrag says many organisations have adopted tactical green IT measures because when they designed their solutions they did not have greening in mind.

He explains that 'green by design' is much more sustainable. “This implies re-looking at software and solutions design and how this drives deployment patterns, what high availability really provides, and what it is costing companies to have idle passive backup servers consuming resources without doing any productive work.”

Simplifying solutions

Wandrag adds that modern architectures should not only have greener perspectives, but also look at ways of reducing complexity while simplifying at the same time.

He argues that IT hardware costs in the distributed systems space have been plummeting for many years. “This has driven the approach of 'dime-a-dozen' when deploying server farms without looking at ways of optimally re-using spare capacity, capacity planning and availability.

“Fortunately ailing aisle space in server rooms has been giving some back pressure in the proliferation of servers, and IT administrators are now looking to scale up using virtualisation to squeeze more OS into the same floor space,” he says.

According to Wandrag, modern architectures should take into account right-sizing, capacity on demand and thinner provisioning than has traditionally been the case. Modern system and infrastructure architectures are elegant, and elegance is not easy.

Wandrag's talk takes a look at traditional architecture patterns and how one can go about making them a little greener without sacrificing too much of their high availability requirements.

He believes companies will soon start demanding green procurement. With the IT sector rivalling aviation in its carbon footprint, the sector will face similar pressures from governments to start addressing environmental impacts.

“Planning and architecting infrastructure and business solutions to be more green from the start will instil a culture of environmentally-conscious IT. This will become a competitive edge in the future,” he concludes.