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.

ITWeb: Eco jam sparks green thinking

Thanks to Lezette from ITWeb for this great article on IBM's Eco Jam.

Eco jam sparks green thinking

In a world facing unprecedented demands on scarce resources, consumers and businesses will have to revolutionise the way they use, monitor, and manage information.

This was one of the key messages emerging from IBM's Eco Efficiency Web jam last week, which saw thousands of business leaders and industry experts from around the world exchanging ideas around efficiency and sustainability.

Clifford Foster, IBM's CTO for sub-Saharan Africa, says the eco jam fits in with the group's Smart Planet agenda, which involves identifying scarce resources and finding a way to better manage them. “Smart Planet is about making better use of the resources we have available, for the benefit of the environment, people, and organisations' competitiveness.”

According to Foster, the jamming concept allows for the gathering of as many viewpoints as possible, so contributors can pool their knowledge through themed discussions, in a drive to encourage collaboration in tackling the world's eco challenges.

Foster says the main goal is to stimulate discussions between people who have never connected before.

”Think of it as forums or wikis on steroids, with people sharing ideas to generate new lines of thought.”

According to Foster, a total of 925 client companies from 45 countries participated in the Web-based brainstorming event, with more than 2 000 posts on six key themes, including renewable energy, sustainable technologies, regulation, and green infrastructure.

“While we're seeing an unprecedented demand on water and energy supply, at the same time, there's an interesting trend in technology, which puts us in a better position to manage this demand,” notes Foster.

“One is instrumentation – by putting sensors on everything, we can detect, for example, water leakages, or contamination, or where water is being used in factories and houses, in real-time. If we connect this information to services such as disaster management and healthcare, we can make intelligent decisions, preventing problems before they happen.”

Connected intelligence

By connecting various streams of information together, says Foster, organisations and consumers can move towards predicting events, making smarter decisions, and ultimately doing things differently. Working more efficiently will also see a reduced impact on the environment.

“If we want to tackle the mega problems, such as non-renewable energies and the Smart Planet agenda, these solutions touch on so many organisations and interested parties that you need everybody to want to play,” explains Foster. He uses smart shipping as an example, with the numerous groups involved – from the manufacturer of the goods, to the customer, to the freight and shipping companies, to government from a revenue perspective.

“To solve the big problems, we need to look at things from an info-sharing perspective. In many cases a lot of the information needed to make more proactive decisions resides in a metaphorical island. Until you get companies to share information and look for trends and complementary solutions, we're not going to be able to mine data for the insight needed to do things differently,” he argues.

Foster cites a case in China, where IBM implemented a smart metering system at Dong Energy, consisting of sensors on the entire energy network to detect outages in real-time. “With the way the energy network is configured, you can then re-route energy around the faulty area, and substantially reduce outages in networks,” he explains.

“Energy outages impact everybody – they impact production, an organisation's productivity, and people's lives, and cost money.” Foster adds that smart metering in houses and businesses is an effective way of reducing this impact, as it costs a lot more to fix a problem than to manage it.

“From a consumer perspective, imagine a house where you can see the power usage on single dashboard, which tells you what the energy consumption is at different times of the day, and which appliances are actually consuming energy. Then you can make more intelligent decisions about when you switch appliances on or off. It's pretty important to people to have better understanding of how to better use available energy.”

Changing focus

Foster says the discussion he was driving during the jam was how to change the perception of the green agenda from one that just focuses on the environment, to something that makes good business sense.

“If you use less energy, your goods cost less, which means higher profitability. At the same time, using less energy not only costs less, but allows you to store energy for off-peak times, which makes more energy available to citizens at a decent price. So there's a positive impact for people and business.”

Going forward, Foster anticipates a holistic approach to resource management. “I foresee sustainability being baked into the metrics and executive agenda at all organisations, as a way to measure themselves, and the people running the business unit. This will happen more and more as government starts putting in regulations.”

From a technology side, Foster says effective monitoring of information will have a profound effect on the amount of energy houses and businesses save. “Every single appliance and device is going to be smart and aware enough to measure its own energy consumption, and communicate that data so it can start up or shut down when required.”

He adds that SA is well situated to take advantage of this development. “Prepaid energy meters are a well-established energy device in the country, and the next generation of these will not just be about switching off when you run out of credit, but actually being able to decide whether you switch off at certain times of the day, or switch off automatically.

“If you take that technology into businesses, we'll see a profound reduction in energy demand, apart from the actual devices using less energy.”

He adds that the recession has served as an important catalyst for change. “In a period of excess, everything is cheap, and people don't really think about how they use resources. But the age of excess is over. The facts are that the demand on resources we have is outstripping supply, and have to use it more efficiently.“

From an African perspective, says Foster, there are a different set of challenges focusing attention on resources. “Eskom does not have enough energy to meet demand, and it's forcing us to think about things differently. Innovations are born in areas where we have these kinds of challenges, and Africa is a breeding ground for these kinds of innovations.”

ITWeb: Green gets smart

Write-up from the Green IT presentation last week:


“The way to address that opportunity is not in an isolated fashion. You get the biggest bang for your buck by looking at the entire value chain.”

Smarter planet
Foster explained that organisations are in a position to measure information on a scale never seen before, and that the cost of measuring devices, mainly transistors, has dropped to almost nothing. “We can sense and see the exact condition of practically anything for very little cost.”

This is coupled with a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected, according to Foster, evidenced by the explosion in telecommunications and the growing number of mobile phone subscriptions, which stands at around four billion worldwide. “People, systems and objects can communicate and interact with each other in entirely new ways,” he explained.

“Once all the information is collected, and you've connected it all together, then you're producing vast amounts of information in real-time. This is where the third concept comes in – you can make intelligent decisions,” argued Foster.

He explained that intelligent decision-making involves using the information gathered to determine how to prevent problems from happening before they occur. “It's not about doing things at month-end, or after they have happened; if you can detect what's happening in real-time you can prevent power outages on the energy grid, and wastages in terms of energy and water consumption. We can do things fundamentally differently.

“With this amount of intelligence and processing power being embedded in devices you wouldn't have thought of as computers a while ago, there's no reason why any device, person, process, or organisation can't be digitally aware, connected, and smart,” Foster added.

“Then it's a case of how to use all of that to impact your green agenda, and how to reduce costs, improve operational efficiencies and bring new products to market quicker.”

Less is more
Foster outlined three considerations in moving towards a more sustainable and cost-effective business, the first being how to do more with less. “Don't just look at one aspect; look at everything in the organisation.” According to Foster, this includes applications and data, information technology, real estate and facilities, building infrastructure, and energy management.

Another consideration for businesses, said Foster, is the need to be more responsible. “Organisations are being challenged to account for the environmental and social impacts of their activities. It starts with a clear strategy in terms of what the green agenda is, and having a governance model that sits at the forefront of the organisation, to measure and monitor processes.”

He added that companies need to consider the implications of their suppliers' and manufacturing activities on overall costs. “You cannot just assume that your trading partners are green, you have to ask for green credentials and measure what they do if you claim greenness in terms of regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations.”

Thirdly, said Foster, organisations need to be more efficient. “You need to look at building smart systems and practical applications. Intelligent systems gather, synthesise and apply information to change the way the entire industry operates.”

He cited US Department of Energy figures that show 67% of energy is lost in transmission. “Imagine if you could detect an error before it becomes critical, and send people out before the impact of the problem becomes consequential.”

Foster believes the possibilities have only just begun, with the vast amounts information being collected in real-time offering huge opportunities. “The implications of living in a socially, technologically, and economically connected world are being felt more profoundly now than ever before.”


Original article here

Green and Beyond

I think that we can all agree that the economic downturn and ecological reality of living in a globally integrated world has required us to rethink our approach to doing business. It is also fair to say that the approaches of the past are not sustainable and that the impact thereof on the environment can not continue unabated.

The challenge we have to accept is to reinvent how we do business, not only to survive and grow, but also to achieve the goals of conservation and pollution prevention.

I think that there are three primary questions we need to answer.

How do we do more with less?

We should build green infrastructures that take out cost and improve the efficiency of our assets and infrastructure. We must strive to maximize the efficiency of what we have; reduce the ecological footprint thereof; whilst providing the platform for business growth without adding to what we have.

How can we be more responsible?

We should build sustainable solutions that focus on increasing efficiency and abating the environmental impact of processes, products and people. There are significant benefits to measuring, monitoring and streamlining processes across the value chain. The difficult is that we can not achieve the full potential of these solutions if we work in isolation. Improvement s across the value chain will yield the most significant benefits.

How can we be more efficient?

We need to build solutions that are able to make intelligent decisions based on the wealth of information available across an entire industry. For example, we are able to use predictive analytics for water management; automate, monitor and control two-way flow of energy from power plant to plug; and build optimized transportation systems.

Let’s talk

What it takes is a willingness of stakeholders across the value chain to collaborate, share information and aspire to build a smarter planet.

edit 22/07/09: I was interviewed on this concept of Green IT - refer to the second half of the following podcast by FinWeek

Green is Green

Energy costs are fast becoming the largest data centre operating cost, whilst up to 85% of computing capacity sits idle in distributed computing environments. Datacentres are physical structures that require tremendous amounts of power and cooling in order to operate and it is easy to see how improving this can translate into “greenbacks” for the organisation.


Baseline
From my perspective there are several key areas that organisations should tackle, but first and foremost, it is critical for themto implement a system to measure and track energy use. This will provide the baseline for driving a strategy to reduce energy consumption; reduce the impact on the environment; and improve operational efficiency.

There are some key enabling technologies that should be considered as part of an overall energy efficiency programme; and those that most impress me the most are virtualisation, cloud computing and purpose-built data centres.

Virtualisation
Virtualisation, both server and storage, is probably the fastest and easiest way to drive energy efficiency. The concept is a simple one: Maximise available resources (processing and storage), whilst “switching on” new resources when they are required. The separation of virtual machines/resources from physical machines/resources is implementable today and the business case proven.

Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is an interesting element in this overall story. Whilst we are still in the early stages of cloud maturity and adoption, it is definitely worth investigating. A cloud is essentially a pool of virtualised computer resources that we access as services.

The cloud platform is green by design as it dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, and de-provisions servers as needed. This separation (as with virtualisation) of what we want to process versus where it is processed provides us with the opportunity to maximise processing efficiency and drive green computing.

Data Centres
Now onto the actual data centre itself as the benefits of scaling a datacentre diminish if it is too large and requires too much energy.

There is an optimal efficiency that can be reached in a datacenter by matching the machines to the building (or vice versa). We can attain maximum efficiency by optimising all of the components that reside in the physical building, and monitoring power and heat with sensors that feed back into the systems management capability.

We can take this one step further by designing data centres with the type and load of processing in mind. This is the concept of a purpose-built data centre and not the current paradigm of adding servers and cooling to an existing building. There may be even be a variety of different types of datacenters, based on their respective purpose, within an overall network of processing capability.


So green is green; from an eco-friendly and economic perspective.