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WHAT IS A CARBON FOOTPRINT?
Every organisation has a
carbon footprint.
It is the measure of green house gases that are produced by
burning fossil fuels.
Your
organisation's carbon footprint is the amount of
CO2 emissions that it creates through daily
activities that use energy from fossil fuels (i.e. coal,
oil, and gas). These fuels release CO2 and other
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
During the 150 years of the industrial age,
the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increased by 31 percent.
As the concentration of greenhouse gases
grows, heat is trapped in the atmosphere
and less escapes into space. This increase
in trapped heat changes the climate and alters
weather patterns, which may hasten species
extinction, influence the length of seasons,
cause coastal flooding, and lead to more
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HOW DOES YOUR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PRODUCE A
CARBON FOOTPRINT?
Running your servers and personal
computers, under-utilising hardware, using old servers,
not optimising server space and virtual servers all use
energy that creates a carbon footprint. For example, a moderate size server has about
the same annual carbon footprint as a gas-guzzling family
SUV getting 15 miles-to-the-gallon.
To get this into a bigger context, the largest global
financial services organisations - all information intensive
companies - generate about 500,000
metric tons of CO2 per year and information technology electricity consumption
accounts for up to 65 percent of that total.
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WHY WOULD YOU BOTHER?
Reducing an organisation's carbon footprint is
not just the environmentally correct thing to do, it's also a
way to save money.
Here at Paua, we've been
monitoring the trends worldwide and it is clear that changes in your compliance regime will most likely
occur. Most major world governments are
drafting policies and legislation as we speak. We think it is only a matter of time
before our government imposes compliance and carbon tax on
organisations to reach a lower carbon footprint.
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HOW MUCH MONEY CAN BE
SAVED?
Because organisations are increasing their
information capacity and buying more systems, they need more power.
Global energy prices
are rising, and so there is a significant increase in
operational budgets. So, organisations who are
reducing their carbon footprint are also saving millions.
It is this potential to reduce costs that is the most compelling
incentive for organisations to 'think and act green'. For example:
- 3M reduced its carbon footprint by 37 percent and have
saved more than $190 million.
- Canon's energy efficient products yielded savings of
$250 million for its customers.
- IBM saved $791 million by reducing emissions 37.8
percent through energy conservation measures.
- California, the world's sixth largest economy, has
already saved itself $20 billion in electricity and natural
gas expenditures and by 2011 forecasts saving $57 billion
more.
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WHAT ABOUT YOUR INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY AND DATA CENTRE?
Many organisations have an
ever-increasing reliance on IT. However, due to the sheer
size, complexity and pace of change, CIOs and IT
managers
do not fully understand how or what their infrastructure is all doing and how it supports the business.
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For example, they may not know the percentage of equipment
that consumes electricity while it is either idle or under-used.
So, organisations tend to buy new equipment rather than to share or
redeploy what it already has. This inefficient
resource planning means there is more infrastructure than is
necessary to meet business objectives.
DATA CENTRE OPTIMISATION
Today, we see leading
organisations using data centre optimisation to reduce their
power consumption and carbon emissions. For example,
they reduce the number of servers, switch off unused hardware,
replace
slow, power-hungry servers, and move to virtual hardware.
Data centre optimisation strategies focus on the
convergence of resources (data centres, servers, storage,
networks, business applications, infrastructure products)
along with actions (refresh, consolidate, retire or virtualise.)
- Refreshing a resource means replacing it with newer
technology. It might mean replacing slow, power-hungry
servers with something smaller, faster
and more efficient.
- Consolidation refers to the migration
from several instances of a resource into fewer. This might
mean consolidating databases running on multiple servers
into a single server.
- Retiring resources is getting rid of unused or
unnecessary resources.
- Virtualisation techniques are creating multiple virtual servers
instead of physical servers.
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TYPICAL PHASES OF DATA CENTRE
OPTIMISATION
Typical phases of data centre optimisation
include:
- Inventory - A complete IT inventory of servers, storage
and applications, including identifying inter-system and
application dependencies and relationships. This is used in planning, costing and risk-mitigation.
- Analyse - This phase gets a deeper
understanding of how the technology underpins your business.
The focus is on how technology
and application assets relate to the business and maps the dependency-relationships
between them.
- Design and plan - This phase finds the optimisation
opportunities, designs the desired outcome,
and plans the process to get there.
- Implement - This phase requires a precise
picture of the state of the IT environment on a day to day
basis. It monitors progress, provides a
continuous updated view of the environment when
incidents occur, and assists re-planning.
The end goal of any data centre optimisation project is
to improve utilisation, and keep IT inventory, rack space
and power requirements to the minimum necessary while
maintaining appropriate Service Level Agreements.
Ultimately, data centre optimisation can become a
business-as-usual process that contributes to an on-going
reduction in a company's carbon emissions and to significant
cost savings.
At the same time, carbon emissions, power costs and location
requirements are also minimised. And your organisation's
carbon footprint simply becomes good business.
Contact us here to find out more
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