SON SON
Green IT is all about moving forward, right? Well, not quite. Most companies need to take a step backward first, and perhaps a step sideways, too. Let me explain. We’re seeing rapid growth of computing resources within companies worldwide: server growth at 28% per year, storage growth at 45% per year, MIPS growth at 17% per year, and desktop growth at 1.3 times the rate of labor pool growth. What impact does this growth have on the climate? And what can IT managers do right now to reverse a negative trend?
Take a step backward
With technology continually expanding, most organizations follow conventional wisdom adding capacity to do more business. The word “adding” is key here. Few IT managers are looking for the “right” capacity.
The question IT should be asking is this: Do we have more or less technology than we need to effectively run and grow our business? Since the beginning of the IT-business era, “more” has always been defined as better. That’s just not so.
Let’s look at the financial services industry, which is the poster child for computational intensity. The average financial services company has 1.07 MIPS and 0.46 servers per $1 million in revenue. The most power-hungry firms in that sector are using 3.23 MIPS and 1.26 servers per $1 million in revenue. Those users are tapping three times the computing capacity of similar businesses and creating perhaps more than three times the carbon footprint.
What produces this large gap? Differences in underlying business processing, the way these businesses design and deploy their systems. And this in turn is a major driver of their power consumption, cooling needs and resulting carbon footprint.
Coincidentally, those power-hungry financial services firms have a “compute cost” of more than $17,000 per $1 million in revenue. The most efficient competitor in their market is at $8,900 per $1 million in revenue. There are clearly business benefits for footprint reduction, too.
In this context, taking a step “backward” means reassessing the very basics of your entire footprint (more than just compute) before moving forward to optimize. Optimizing from the wrong starting point will likely lead to suboptimal “green” results for your company and for the planet.
There are other critical business reasons to take such a step backward that tie into business competitiveness.
Just as consumers today look at nutrition labeling on food packages to make buying decisions, they will soon look at information about a product’s carbon footprint and effect on climate change. (This is already happening in the automotive world.)
For example, preliminary analyses of the IT load generated by a single credit-card transaction ranges from 0.04 lb. of carbon output per transaction for Card X to 0.23 lb. of carbon output per transaction for Card Y. If you had this information, which card would you choose?
Take a step sideways
Optimizing computing resources within a single company won’t have the maximum climate-change impact we need to protect our planet. Green IT has to be a group effort.
At any point in time, 40% or more of the world’s computing capacity is untapped or idle. If shared wisely, this excess capacity could forestall perhaps two to three years of expansion within companies. Although issues of data and application transport, privacy, and security are extremely complex, companies need to address virtualization “in the large” and create mechanisms to offset continuous consumption increases.
What am I advocating here? First, look at technology sizing and leverage to get the right starting point. Second, look laterally across companies and focus on options to forestall growth.
Just as with oil dependence and oil consumption, in IT we must look for alternatives. Alternative capacity models and alternative computing collaboration models will free IT from its potential negative impacts on our climate.
By : Howard Rubin