According to a report from a respected industry research body, for every rand spent on computer hardware in 2010, another 50 cents will be spent on energy to power it. This trend is expected to worsen and within the next several years energy costs will consume up to one-third of IT budgets in total.
Curtailing energy consumption is, therefore, a significant global challenge that must be addressed by all stakeholders today.
For almost all companies, the goal of reducing power consumption makes sense from an economic perspective. But minimising energy use also has an environmental impact, and in today's business climate having a 'green strategy' in place makes good business sense.
According to research, at least 80% of companies in Europe are concerned with the environment and have energy conservation programmes in mind. Here in South Africa we may have some way to go before we reach this benchmark, but there are encouraging signs that larger organisations are addressing energy saving issues, particularly in their power hungry data centres.
Up and up
The US-based Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says the amount of energy consumed by corporate data centres worldwide doubled between 2000 and 2006 and is expected to double again by 2010.
As a rule, approximately 30% of the energy used in a data centre is consumed by IT loads. The other 70% goes to supporting the network-critical physical infrastructure equipment through air conditioning, heating and humidification equipment. Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) equipment alone consumes around 18% of the power.
Power wastage is also high due to inefficiencies in basic designs. For instance, the average PC wastes about half of the power it consumes, while the average server squanders about one-third.
As a result, a significant percentage of all the energy consumed by the data centre ends up as waste heat, which is released into the atmosphere.
This inefficiency has been well understood for some time but - generally speaking - little has been done to reduce energy consumption apart from temporary measures such as server power management initiatives.
Make the change
The average PC wastes about half of the power it consumes, while the average server squanders about one-third.
Philip Hampton is CTO at Powermode
It's important to understand that moves to reduce overall energy consumption of IT equipment can also reduce the power demands - and power rating - of the physical infrastructure. It's the difference between reducing energy consumption temporarily and reducing it permanently.
In other words, permanent or structural changes such as the installation of high efficiency servers or high efficiency UPS systems reduce both the electricity costs and the infrastructure costs.
Taking the concept of energy saving one step further, companies are now realising that the cost of running and maintaining equipment during its life cycle has to be scrutinised - in addition to its energy consumption.
According to the IDC research group, for every server removed from a data centre, approximately 11.4 tons of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change are eliminated from the atmosphere.
By adopting new-generation energy-saving techniques, the EPA estimates that data centres could cut their energy use by around 50% by 2011.
For example, by swapping energy-inefficient processors and power supplies for high-efficiency components, significant amounts of energy can be saved. The typical processors in use today consume around 90 watts of electricity per hour. The latest low-power, lower voltage versions consume - on average - 30 watts less.
As with processors, many of the server power supplies in use today are not capable of delivering the levels of efficiency that the latest models can.
In addition, by migrating from hard disk-only storage to tape storage technology as part of a tiered storage infrastructure to support backup and archiving, companies can reap the benefits of significantly lower energy consumption, low cost of ownership and portability for data protection.
Keeping up
While it is important for companies to have a 'green' roadmap, it is vital for the industry to keep pace with the demands of the environmentally aware and establish best practices that accommodate so-called 'cradle to grave' strategies. These address not only energy consumption issues, but the implication of energy usage in manufacturing and the possibility for its recovery in recycling.
To achieve real and lasting results, manufacturers and end-users alike must make real, long-term commitments to a sustainable future.
The way is being shown by a coalition of technology companies led by Google and Intel. Together with environmental groups, they have launched an initiative to conserve electricity and curb global warming emissions by making the world's computers and servers more energy-efficient.
The Climate Savers Computing Initiative aims to cut the amount of electricity computers consume in half by 2010, which is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by 54 million tons annually.
Clearly, the IT industry must make deep and fundamental changes to reduce the carbon footprint of its products and its users' businesses.
* Philip Hampton is CTO at Powermode.
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