Taking a sustainable route to Green IT

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Taking a sustainable route to Green IT

Posted On : May-24-2010 | seen (407) times | Article Word Count : 965 |

HCLISD takes a holistic approach to creating Green datacenters. Read them talking about Green IT as means of increasing energy efficiency of the IT hardware & how virtualization helps achieving the same.

Green IT is not about buying a lot of jazzy ‘green’ hardware. It is about holistic efficiency, and that should make it a more sustainable transformation.

Concerns over global warming, energy conservation, and social responsibility are leading to an unprecedented amount of media coverage about all things that need to go “Green”. Not only is there increased press coverage, but environmental protection issues are also gaining much more visibility with IT managers too.
Going Green can be both environmentally responsible and cost efficient for the enterprise. A successful Green initiative not only increases the availability of IT infrastructure but will also help reduce costs for the enterprise. It can also be a platform to bring in a new level of discipline in IT provisioning and management.
Why Green?
IT has been on an unsustainable path for years. Huge data centers feeding on electricity; millions of computers burn up processor power performing background processes, many a times while their users are in meetings; add to it piles of emails, and documents are needlessly printed off and never read.
If these factors alone are not reason enough to sign up to Green IT, there are countless more. Many UK and EU regulations and campaigns demand greener businesses. Employees are increasingly ‘Green aware’ and want to see their company contributing to the solution, rather than exacerbating the problem. Sooner rather than later, someone—your boss, a big customer or a government agency—is going to want to know what you’re doing to comply with, support or advance your company’s efforts to become more environmentally responsible.
Defining Green IT
Green IT as means of increasing energy efficiency of the IT hardware, IT Data Centers and other assets. Since IT consumes very large quantities of renewable and not so renewable resources like silicon, platinum and others, a big part of Green IT also implies reducing electronic parts waste. IT also consumes space on the planet and data centers. Thus, Green IT also means reducing the data center footprint on the environment.
Datacenter is at the heart of Green IT
While ‘Green’ IT is a discussion that merits a long discussion, for the want of time and space we can perhaps focus on the heart of the issue today, which lies inside the datacenter of an enterprise.
The Data Center is often the engine that drives the growth of the enterprise, and energy efficiency is the key there. According to recent AFCOM Data Center Institute survey, 50% of every dollar spent on a new server goes into the energy to power and cool it. The Lean & Green consortium predicts that by the end of 2008, the cost of powering a server may even exceed the cost of the server itself.
In fact, as per some reports Data centers consume between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of all the power generated annually in the United States— at the high end, that’s equivalent to the electricity needed to power the state of Michigan for one year.
Therefore, power management is a key aspect to achieving a Green Data Center. Simple acts such as turning off unused lights, PCs and other devices are powerful and strikingly easy changes. Furthermore, in many organizations the ‘power save’ features do exist, but have not been activated. Energy Star standards also enable us to determine what the impact of various equipments is before we buy it. At the next level, is to ensure an equipment layout that optimizes cooling.
But when considering using environmentally friendly techniques, companies should take the Green effort beyond power saving through the tactical ways. Today the need is to transform the Data Center footprints through more sustainable strategies like consolidation and virtualization which offer a more long-term solution to the problem.
Zooming in on Virtualization buzz
Virtualization reduces the server footprint and therefore improves energy efficiency of an enterprise. Implementing server virtualization can result in significant savings. Estimates by VMware and PG&E Co. state that direct energy savings for each server removed via server virtualization runs between $300 and $600 per year.
In fact Virtualization is today becoming a strategy of choice for CIOs across the world. Experts and practitioners agree on the fact that virtualization of Data Centers not only improves performance, but increases IT efficiency, cuts power and cooling costs, and makes disaster recovery as easy as pushing a button.
According to Gartner, Virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. Analysts at Gartner state that the leading edge of this change is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures. According to the research agency’s figures, there were about 540,000 virtual machines deployed around the world, not including consumer usage. By 2009, this figure is expected to soar to over 4 million.
All these numbers validly represent the growing demand and adoption of virtualization in enterprises across the globe.
Consolidation is another option. If you are not prepared to launch the virtualization project, you can consolidate your existing server. This can be done first by looking at application optimization and then drilling that down into complete requirement mapping. The next step is analyzing the application server maps that are in place and then consolidate servers according to that. These are again long term programs that need to be well planned.
The holistic approach
The key to handling the complexity of Greening a Data Center is to take a holistic approach. An enterprise must look at all the aspects of the environmental impact instead of focusing only on the most obvious ones. Many a times, a plan on paper, may yield consequences way beyond what was originally expected. Therefore, planning and implementing the initiative in a phased manner is the secret to energy efficient and clean IT.

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<h1>Taking a sustainable route to Green IT</h1> Author: <a href='http://www.articleseen.com/profile_Aditya Chatterjee.aspx'>Aditya Chatterjee</a> Green IT is not about buying a lot of jazzy ‘green’ hardware. It is about holistic efficiency, and that should make it a more sustainable transformation.

Concerns over global warming, energy conservation, and social responsibility are leading to an unprecedented amount of media coverage about all things that need to go “Green”. Not only is there increased press coverage, but environmental protection issues are also gaining much more visibility with IT managers too.
Going Green can be both environmentally responsible and cost efficient for the enterprise. A successful Green initiative not only increases the availability of IT infrastructure but will also help reduce costs for the enterprise. It can also be a platform to bring in a new level of discipline in IT provisioning and management. 
Why Green?
IT has been on an unsustainable path for years. Huge data centers feeding on electricity; millions of computers burn up processor power performing background processes, many a times while their users are in meetings; add to it piles of emails, and documents are needlessly printed off and never read.
If these factors alone are not reason enough to sign up to Green IT, there are countless more. Many UK and EU regulations and campaigns demand greener businesses. Employees are increasingly ‘Green aware’ and want to see their company contributing to the solution, rather than exacerbating the problem. Sooner rather than later, someone—your boss, a big customer or a government agency—is going to want to know what you’re doing to comply with, support or advance your company’s efforts to become more environmentally responsible.
Defining Green IT
Green IT as means of increasing energy efficiency of the IT hardware, IT Data Centers and other assets. Since IT consumes very large quantities of renewable and not so renewable resources like silicon, platinum and others, a big part of Green IT also implies reducing electronic parts waste. IT also consumes space on the planet and data centers. Thus, Green IT also means reducing the data center footprint on the environment.
Datacenter is at the heart of Green IT
While ‘Green’ IT is a discussion that merits a long discussion, for the want of time and space we can perhaps focus on the heart of the issue today, which lies inside the datacenter of an enterprise.
The Data Center is often the engine that drives the growth of the enterprise, and energy efficiency is the key there. According to recent AFCOM Data Center Institute survey, 50% of every dollar spent on a new server goes into the energy to power and cool it. The Lean & Green consortium predicts that by the end of 2008, the cost of powering a server may even exceed the cost of the server itself.
In fact, as per some reports Data centers consume between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of all the power generated annually in the United States— at the high end, that’s equivalent to the electricity needed to power the state of Michigan for one year.
Therefore, power management is a key aspect to achieving a Green Data Center. Simple acts such as turning off unused lights, PCs and other devices are powerful and strikingly easy changes. Furthermore, in many organizations the ‘power save’ features do exist, but have not been activated. Energy Star standards also enable us to determine what the impact of various equipments is before we buy it. At the next level, is to ensure an equipment layout that optimizes cooling.   
But when considering using environmentally friendly techniques, companies should take the Green effort beyond power saving through the tactical ways. Today the need is to transform the Data Center footprints through more sustainable strategies like consolidation and virtualization which offer a more long-term solution to the problem.
Zooming in on Virtualization buzz
Virtualization reduces the server footprint and therefore improves energy efficiency of an enterprise. Implementing server virtualization can result in significant savings. Estimates by VMware and PG&E Co. state that direct energy savings for each server removed via server virtualization runs between $300 and $600 per year. 
In fact Virtualization is today becoming a strategy of choice for CIOs across the world. Experts and practitioners agree on the fact that virtualization of Data Centers not only improves performance, but increases IT efficiency, cuts power and cooling costs, and makes disaster recovery as easy as pushing a button. 
According to Gartner, Virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. Analysts at Gartner state that the leading edge of this change is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures. According to the research agency’s figures, there were about 540,000 virtual machines deployed around the world, not including consumer usage. By 2009, this figure is expected to soar to over 4 million.
All these numbers validly represent the growing demand and adoption of virtualization in enterprises across the globe.
Consolidation is another option. If you are not prepared to launch the virtualization project, you can consolidate your existing server. This can be done first by looking at application optimization and then drilling that down into complete requirement mapping. The next step is analyzing the application server maps that are in place and then consolidate servers according to that. These are again long term programs that need to be well planned.
The holistic approach
The key to handling the complexity of Greening a Data Center is to take a holistic approach. An enterprise must look at all the aspects of the environmental impact instead of focusing only on the most obvious ones. Many a times, a plan on paper, may yield consequences way beyond what was originally expected. Therefore, planning and implementing the initiative in a phased manner is the secret to energy efficient and clean IT.About the Author: Aditya is a well know author who writes on topics like <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.hclisd.com/Green-IT.aspx">Green IT</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href= "http://www.hclisd.com/Green-Datacenter.aspx">Green Datacenter </a>& <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.hclisd.com/Datacenter-Virtualization.aspx">Datacenter Virtualization</a> Article Source: <a href='http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Taking-a-sustainable-route-to-Green-IT_19786.aspx'> http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Taking a sustainable route to Green IT_19786.aspx</a>

Article Source : http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Taking a sustainable route to Green IT_19786.aspx

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Aditya is a well know author who writes on topics like Green IT, Green Datacenter & Datacenter Virtualization

Keywords : Green IT, Green Datacenter, Datacenter Virtualization,

Category : Computers : Computers

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