Brainstorm: Getting on with Green

Brainstorm printed a great article in their physical magazine on Green and accompanied it with this online piece.    I had the chance to talk to Samantha regarding IBM's Eco-Efficiency Jam and our view on rethinking "Green".

Despite the multitudes doing not much, a number of companies have risen to the challenge and gone green

While you’d be forgiven for thinking that green IT is never going to happen (and let’s be realistic – will IT ever be really green?), some companies have taken the gap and started on green projects, green buildings, green data centres and green organisations.

GijimaAST’s new head office in Midrand is a green building, although as there are several buildings involved, the word ‘campus’ is probably more appropriate.

Jan Smit, DCS business unit executive driving green IT at the company, says that Gijima has engaged with green IT and is busy establishing sustainability around not just green IT, but how organisations can reduce their carbon footprint, be more environmentally friendly and adapt to the pressures around global warming.

“Nobody’s really doing it,” he agrees. “We’re all talking about it and how good we are but no one has gone out and said, ‘Here, we can prove it’. So we’ve started a business unit for it and said we’ll go green, become environmentally friendly and use that experience.”

Net App has revamped its data centres to good effect. Giancarlo Scaramelli, NetApp EMEA IT field services manager, who is part of the ‘Net App on Net App’ program that deals with the company’s internal IT, says that by working aggressively to make its data centres as efficient as possible, the company has saved 40 000 kWh per month.

“We started retro-fitting our older data centres and building new ones with green in mind. The only way to do it was to take a holistic approach, and not just look at what we do (storage) but the whole centre.

“We started in the California data centre. The temperature was often far too low – we needed to work out the optimal operational temperature and so we’ve gone from 11 degrees to closer to 23 degrees. This saves a lot of energy because the need for cooling has reduced. We also looked at whether or not we need to cool the air all the time. In California we can use free air cooling 70 percent of the year.

“Many data centres were designed years and years ago. We still see centres with raised floors, which require pressure to get cold air to the ceiling, so we decided to do it the other way and pump cool air in from the top and let it fall naturally to the floor.”

Installing plastic sheeting, like that used in supermarket coolers, to separate hot aisles and cold aisles proved an inexpensive way to keep air flows apart.

Global view

While many see green as a CSI initiative, or at best a cost-saver, IBM CTO Clifford Foster has a slightly different approach: “People seem to have a fairly narrow view and quickly revert to talking about is a processor green or efficient, where the way I like to look at it is if you work on the assumption that green is doing more with less, i.e. how can we have a positive impact on the environment and the bottom line by doing more with what we have, then green certainly has ROI. You have no need to buy more, which has a direct and equal impact on the environment, or at least less impact.”

In January, IBM convened a Global Eco-Efficiency Jam – a massively-scaled online discussion centred on this strategic, business-critical issue. The Jam enabled senior representatives to co-operatively determine the best actions that can be taken to meet goals for a sustainable future. For 51 hours, thousands of public and private sector sustainability leaders pooled their knowledge and experiences through a series of focused discussions on Green Infrastructure, Sustainable Operations, Intelligent Systems, and Raising the Bar.

It’s something IBM, which started its green initiatives in the ‘80s, takes seriously.

“There’s a wide spectrum of options here,” Foster says. “If you look at the entire dimension of an organisation, even from a data level, if you are managing information and data in your enterprise well (through deduplication, archiving historical information and so on), it requires less storage to keep it. As you move up the stack, the same starts to apply, so you can buy less, and less is manufactured. If you look at applications working on the data, if those are more efficient, you can reduce the processing required, need less processing cycles and have an equal impact, and that goes on and out.

“Look at servers, data centres, the actual building the data centres reside in. Go up the food chain and look at how the organisation can optimise internally, and optimise with trading partners. It becomes a most compelling case for green IT as well as directly impacting effectiveness of the organisation,” he states. And he’s right too.