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.
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. This in turn, may hasten species extinction, influence the length of seasons, cause coastal flooding, and lead to more frequent and severe storms.
During the 150 years of the industrial age, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increased by 31 percent.
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.
It will include things that your business uses such as electricity, gas, fuel through its direct or indirect activities.
HOW DOES YOUR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PRODUCE A CARBON FOOTPRINT?
Running your servers and personal computers, under-utilising hardware, using old energy-hungry servers, not optimising server space or 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.
WOULD YOU BOTHER IF YOU KNEW IT COULD SAVE YOU THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS?
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.
However, some sources say that it is not the environmental responsibility that drives companies to try to reduce their carbon footprint, it is the savings.
It is true that reducing an organisation's carbon footprint is not just the environmentally correct thing to do, it's also a way to save money.
HOW MUCH MONEY CAN BE SAVED?
Because organisations are increasing their information capacity and buying more systems, they need more electricity. Global energy prices are rising, and so there is a significant increase in operational budgets.
Organisations that 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 (figures from 2008):
* 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.
* 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.
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, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT managers do not fully understand how or what their infrastructure is doing and how it supports the business.
For example, they may not know the percentage of equipment that consumes electricity while it is either idle or under-used. So, organisations are tending to buy new equipment rather than to share or redeploy what it already has. They are not taking advantage of more efficient outsourcing arrangements.
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 servers.
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.
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 to find out how we can help you achieve this.
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