March 2009 Archives
- The EPA estimates that by 2011, the country’s data centers will exceed 100 billion kWh, for an annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion. Wizards at the University of Michigan are working to save up to 75% of that by putting servers to sleep.
- According to PC Magazine, idling computers will emit 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 4 million cars and wasting $2.8 billion a year.
- Will RFID enable you to quickly find a parking space without driving around looking for one, or for the water heater to notify you it’s failing, or for your washer to turn on in the middle of the night when electricity is cheapest? IBM thinks so, and believes its Smarter Planet Initiative, along with Linux, is the key to making this happen.
- Raritan thinks it can help (at least in Japan).
- The combined emissions of U.S. papermaking, data centers and client energy demand would fill over 100 Empire State Buildings with solidified CO2 (dry ice) each year, each building with 37 million cubic feet of space, with each cubic foot weighing 100 pounds. Oh, and if you own an iPhone for three years, you’ll release 121 pounds of greenhouse gas, the same as 12 100-watt light bulbs glowing for 691 hours or a car engine burning 603 gallons of gasoline. So says Don Carli.
- Dell is the number one green technology brand. So say 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers.
- 78% of shoppers say that the environmental practices of online retailers are a deciding factor in deciding where to shop online.
- Stop traveling and start collaborating remotely! Green IT is the key to reducing greenhouse gasses, according to the World Wildlife Federation.
What green IT news have you seen or heard lately?
Carbon cap and trade has already arrived in the EU, and it’s on the Obama administration’s priority list as well (the Obama plan calls for an 80% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2050). When (and I believe it’s a question of when, not if) carbon cap and trade arrives in the United States, companies everywhere are going to have to start measuring their carbon emissions to see if they are within their allocated limits. How ready are companies to take those measurements?
Not very, apparently. The good folks at Gartner Research have issued a very illuminating report on how prepared IT companies are to measure their carbon outputs. Gartner conducted a survey back in December of over 600 international companies (U.S., E.U., Australia, India, China), ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 employees, asking about their plans for carbon reporting and pricing, and implementation of carbon reporting and management systems. The survey revealed that less than 20 percent of companies worldwide are considering carbon pricing. A little more than a third of respondents responsible for green IT programs said it was possible, or they didn’t know, if carbon pricing was influencing their organization’s planning. The report can be purchased online for $195. What do you think, dear reader? Is there cause for concern here, or are we looking at another Y2K scarefest?
Two hundred bucks a little too rich for you? Does “Free” fit better into your budget? I like free, especially if it’s a $499 value and free for only a limited time! InformationWeek Analytics has published a report, The Eco-Enterprise and the Reality of Green IT. From the publisher:
The nascent green IT movement is in for some tumultuous times. As the economy slows, there will be an increasing focus on the ROI of all investments, green or otherwise. Meanwhile, the changing of the guard in Washington signals a resurgence of pure green initiatives that unquestionably will add costs, especially those regulating electronic waste and requiring vendors to produce more environmentally friendly systems. These aren't complementary forces. In this report we'll help IT professionals sort out the current green landscape and see where their peers are today, decide where they realistically can be in a year, and look ahead to what's on the horizon.
One way to bypass the 60-vote requirement is through a process called “reconciliation.” When a bill is being reconciled between House and Senate versions, a simple majority (51 votes) will be enough for cloture, and thus ensure passage of the bill. Republicans, being in the minority, hate reconciliation bills and you can bet they’ll protest loudly if the Democrats try to sneak any legislation into reconciliation bills that don’t belong there (a tactic that has been used by both parties in years past).
In the upcoming budget bill (budget bills are subject to the 51-vote reconciliation rule), Democrats are reportedly preparing to insert legislation dealing with a national health care program, a key Democratic priority. So what, you say! This is a green tech blog, not health care! Well, here’s the kicker: if Democrats go with health care, they’re likely to give up on cap and trade in the budget bill, leaving it to go the regular route of legislation.
There’s good news and bad news here. The bad news, obviously, is that cap-and-trade will be put off yet again while the Democrats seek 60 votes, which would require at least a few moderate Republican votes to break rank. The good news is that if it passes, cap-and-trade won’t be subject to the ten-year sunset rule that budget bills have. In all fairness, cap-and-trade is such a major piece of legislation that it probably deserves its own bill and debate anyway.
Auto manufacturing is not typically viewed as a very clean process. Putting aside the products themselves (no Hummer v. Prius fights today, please), making cars involves transforming heavy rolled steel, rubber, plastics and glass into an appliance that can move a family of five across the country in luxury and safety for years or decades to come. The auto factories I’ve visited, some in North America and some in Asia, were all huge complexes, modern and well-lit, but one can’t help but notice the environmental impact these plants can generate. From tremendous energy consumption to waste byproducts (everything from boxes to paint chemicals, auto factories can be environmental nightmares.
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Professors Alan Robinson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Dean Schroeder (Valparaiso University, Valparaiso) published an article, “Greener and Cheaper,” examining how Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. (a division of Japan’s Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd), operates a green auto manufacturing facility in Lafayette, Indiana. Subaru, of course, manufactures the Outback, Legacy and Tribeca models. Since 2000, the plant has achieved a 14% reduction in electricity consumption on a per-car basis. More remarkably, the plant has not shipped any waste to a landfill since May 2004! And this isn’t just some PR hack’s hyperventilating keyboard making these claims, folks. Professors Robinson and Schroeder are well-respected academics who document these claims, and more, in the article.
In a sidebox, the article describes 5 levels of commitment for categorizing companies based on their environmental strategies. They are:
LEVEL 1: Compliance
Management's focus is
on compliance with environmental rules and regulations. Green is considered a
cost.
LEVEL 2: Opportunistic and Ad Hoc
Some
environmental awareness. Management opportunistically takes advantage of low-cost,
money-saving green projects.
LEVEL 3: Analytical and Systematic
Environmental
impact is systematically measured, and the information used by management to
select improvement projects. The company is building its understanding of the
relationships between environmental impact, cost and risk in its business.
LEVEL 4: Integrated Into Daily Operations
Everyone
in the company is expected to be involved in improving the company's green
performance, and most ideas come from the bottom up. Green becomes an integral
part of what makes the company profitable.
LEVEL 5: Pioneering
The organization is developing approaches on the leading edge of current
environmental practice and thinking.
I think it’s a pretty effective way of describing and
cataloging management commitment to environmental initiatives, without being
too broad with platitudes while preserving some granularity in the
descriptions.
So how do you describe your company?
Just a quick reminder that this Wednesday at noon (Eastern),
Climate Savers Computing Initiative and the EPA are offering an educational webinar
on the benefits and savings associated with enterprise power management. Attendees receive a copy of the
Forrester Research report titled “How Much Money Are Your Idle PCs Wasting,” a
$279 value. The best part is the
price for the webinar: FREE. So go
ahead, convince your boss to order-in pizza (or breakfast if you’re a
left-coaster), and join the fun.
Registration required at the link above.
It's a sea of press releases out there, but this one caught my attention. Pittsburgh-based Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, with 3.1 million members, has announced that it saved 5.6% in energy costs in 2008, for a total of $329,000 in savings. That's not exactly chump change – how many IT specialists could a company hire for that? And no, the answer is not "One, Me!" Many of the changes are pretty non-revolutionary such as lighting, cleaning hours, and HVAC systems. In one facility, the company installed "energy-saving devices on all beverage vending machines," which I'm guessing means they turned off the refrigerator at night. Makes sense. Here's the part that caught my eye:
At its Silver LEED
certified Data Center facility near Hershey, Pa., energy consumption decreased
by 4.7 percent, resulting in a cost decrease of $52,000 from 2007 to 2008.
These savings are in part because of a reduction of lighting in unoccupied
areas, reduction of HVAC equipment operating hours, and modifications to
temperature and humidity controls.
We all know that server equipment can get pretty unhappy in high temperature and humidity conditions, but maybe Highmark's experience is proof-positive that there is still low-hanging fruit to be plucked when it comes to energy savings in data centers?
As you may have noticed, Enterprise IT Planet’s Green Blog has been a little quiet lately as we re-engineer ourselves to better serve your needs. Starting today, Terence Lau, is our new contributing editor. Terence is a professor at the University of Dayton, and brings a decade’s worth of corporate legal experience to the blog. He’s a former in-house lawyer at Ford, former Fellow at the U.S. Supreme Court, and at least according to him, knows the difference between a router and a switch. With this change, you’ll notice a subtle shift in the blog’s content towards regulations and rules, both proposed and in force, that will affect the way you and your company go green. Don’t worry, this is NOT going to be a legal blog! We’ll still keep you updated on news and product information as they become available, and as always, we’ll listen to you, our audience in guiding the blog’s future growth and development.
If you have any comments or suggestions going forward, please direct them to Terence. Thanks, and happy reading!
Today we published an article by Peter Shaw that combines old hardware, Linux and some DIY gumption to put a Sun Netra T1 105 server that was gathering dust back to work.
There's still a lot of information floating around for these old machines, and many of them are still in good working order. In the past I've resurrected Cobalt Raq3's, Sun Netra's, and more recently some older Dell PowerEdge and IBM Netfinity servers. Doing a search in Google for the Netra turned up a lot of useful sites who have a lot of information on old Sun hardware a good one is Obsolyte.
So if your IT budget's been slashed, have a good look around. You might not be able to cobble together a cutting edge, customer-facing e-commerce server. But you can recycle an old server and fill some application or messaging gaps.
Netgear today announced new switches for SMBs that can result in power savings of up to 52 percent. The new ProSafe JGS5xx, GS1xx and GS6xx series switches, which are making an appearance at CeBIT in Germany this week, have features that are becoming de rigueur in green label networking gear. These include automatically cutting power to ports when they're inactive and determining the cable length to supply just the right amount of power required to keep the connection alive.
NETGEAR has applied these green system enhancements to the ProSafe JGS5xx Series of 16- and 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switches (JGS516v2, JGS524v2); the ProSafe GS1xx Series of 5- and 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Desktop Switches (GS105v3, GS108v3); and the GS6xx Series of 5- and 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switches (GS605v3, GS608v3). Together, they represent the best option for SMBs to reduce their ongoing network infrastructure costs.
All of the above models go on sale in the second quarter.
