How IT can reduce its power use

Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference last week that the government will ‘ensure every major business in the country has a responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions’.

Businesses account for more than 40 per cent of carbon emissions in the UK. And while Downing Street says the prime minister was referring to incentives rather than regulations, firms are already looking at the carbon footprint of their power consumption and developing strategies to improve energy efficiency.

Power consumption is the largest controllable outgoing of any office, according to government advisory group Envirowise. Technology is a major element of energy use, and has a critical role to play in reducing emissions. Hence the fifth point of Computing’s Green Charter: identify IT management practices that reduce power consumption.

There are simple measures businesses can deploy to reduce energy consumption, such as switching off equipment, improving staff awareness, and running upgrade patching during the day so systems can be shut down at night – see box, below.

Global bank HSBC, for example, has recently installed the NightWatchman automatic shut-down software that monitors the desktop network and carries out an intelligent switch-off of PCs not in use.

Green concerns are also starting to play a role in IT infrastructure management.

Corporate data centres are a key focus for power-saving plans because of the massive amount of power they consume. Such developments are only in their infancy, but are likely to become the norm as the focus on energy and environmentalism becomes increasingly pervasive.

Virtualisation software can be used to ensure that the data centre is run as efficiently as possible. It can select the area of hardware on which to run a given task energy-consciously, and ensure that sections of the data centre not in use are powered down until needed.

Different elements of the hardware in a data centre require a different temperature. Currently, fans are used to keep the entire site at the lowest temperature, but dividing the data centre into zones and cooling each part only according to its requirements will help to cut down unnecessary energy use.

Reusing the heat produced by a data centre to power the building’s central heating or hot water is also a potential development. The model for this strategy would be similar to decentralised Combined Heat and Power (CHP) electricity generation, which uses a network of small, local plants – rather than a large, remote power station – so that the heat produced as a by-product of electricity generation can be used, rather than flushed away.

Some firms are already investigating the potential of green office buildings and energy-efficient data centres – see box, above.

Technology supplier Sun Microsystems is investigating a number of high-tech solutions to reduce power consumption in its data centres, says head of public policy Richard Barrington.

‘Most data centres run at 15 to 20 per cent capacity, so we are using virtualisation to get the systems themselves to decide what is best to run on what,’ he said.

‘We are also looking at energy management: if a machine is using only 20 per cent of its energy, we turn off the other 80 per cent, and if it only needs two fans to reach the optimum temperature then we turn off the one it is not using.’

Sun is also planning to test the practicalities of using the heat from its data centres to provide central heating. If successful, the scheme could also provide heat outside the company.

‘We are also looking at doing something in the local community, perhaps providing power for a school,’ said Barrington.

Alongside green-focused IT management practices, businesses can also get involved with local energy schemes, sourcing power from local CHP plants, or from microgeneration schemes, where individuals or communities generate zero or low-carbon energy to meet their own needs.

Decentralised energy schemes have particular potential for firms with many homeworkers, and could prove financially and environmentally beneficial, says Philip Virgo, strategic adviser to the Institute for the Management of Information Systems.

‘There are various schemes with quite significant grants and subsidies attached,’ he said.

‘Under a corporate scheme with a large number of homeworkers, these could be financially very attractive.’

The green charter in full

To sign up to Computing charter email your details to:

greencomputing@computing.co.uk