By taking responsibility and investigating existing technology that can streamline inefficient operations, companies can reduce their energy bill and “green” their IT departments in a matter of weeks
MORE often than not, when companies are asked how they are reducing their electricity bills or carbon emissions, they will mention their lighting retrofits, their recycling initiatives, their partnerships with other organisations or the logistics department.
The IT department rarely, if ever, features — despite it being a significant contributor to energy costs.
South Africa aims to introduce carbon taxation in the 2013-14 tax year, and we a re already seeing required integrated reporting for JSE-listed companies — all following a 78% increase in energy prices in the past three years. It is crucial that all business areas are on board when it comes to reducing the use of electricity.
We recently conducted an analysis of one of the top four banks in the country and found that more than 90% of their PCs were being left on overnight. In this case, the IT department had been conducting security patching after hours and instructed staff to leave their PCs on for that specific purpose. It’s something we rarely think twice about when we are leaving the office, but the thousands of PCs that were being left on consumed energy with an associated 7500 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. They also incurred a hefty R4m electricity bill each year as a result — without any employees at their desks. The sad part is that the waste is unnecessary.
Simple tooling can shut PCs down and “wake them” remotely without making any changes to network security whatsoever, but a lack of education and understanding about the options available in the PC power-management technology space has kept companies from running as efficiently as they should. IT administrators still mistakenly believe that “wake” on a local area network is not “enabled” on their network and they have no ability to wake devices for patching purposes. (Some IT administrators still believe it’s not “good” for PCs to be continually switched on and off, which may have been true in 1980 but is hardly relevant now.)
Servers are another source of IT electricity waste. Gartner has revealed that 12%-14% of the world’s servers actually have no use whatsoever, but most companies are hesitant to take action to remove or optimise them, because they are terrified of losing data.
Yet by forcing the server software into the lowest energy-using state while running non critical functions (such as anti virus checks overnight), you can cut your server energy use by as much as 12% with no effect on performance.
There are tools available that can overcome tech limitations without any changes to network security or regular operations whatsoever. Unfortunately, we aren’t using them.
There really hasn’t been a compelling reason for chief information officers to reduce their electricity usage or carbon emissions. CEOs aren’t putting pressure on IT executives to reduce energy and there is no legislation compelling them to do so. However, the imminent carbon tax and Eskom price hikes may soon place this issue squarely on the agenda.
By taking responsibility and investigating existing technology that can streamline inefficient operations, companies can reduce their energy bill and “green” their IT departments in a matter of weeks — and go to bed with peace of mind.
Source: Business Day 25 July 2012