Efficient Enterprise: Making a Successful Transition to a Green IT Infrastructure

Adopting a green IT infrastructure is the key to sustainable growth, and in today’s economic climate can often be the difference between simply surviving and flourishing. CIOs can accelerate this transition by cost-justifying strategic IT investments that advance enterprise efficiency while helping to simplify management and reduce operational costs—thereby contributing to a healthy bottom line and a healthy environment.

Read more at
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps4q09-20100174-Green.pdf

Smart Grid Challenges and Opportunities

When researching the term Smart Grid it is apparent there is not one coherent definition. It seems the term Smart Grid describes a concept in a variety of ways, and is often compared to the Internet in potential pervasiveness and usefulness. However the Internet has a distinctive description and a foundation in the definition of the TCP/IP protocol. NIST has taken on the challenge to coordinate the effort of defining Grid interoperability standards analogue to a TCP/IP stack, and a cornerstone definition is the GWAC 8 stack.

One observation can be made that energy consumers in their own are getting very sophisticated and energy optimized, however, from a utility view, these attributes are not accessible. One conclusion can be that Smart Energy Consumers need to be enabled to connect to the utility. Bridging the communication gap between Utilities and Energy Consumers seems paramount. Enabling limited load controls by the utility has potentially substantial benefits. For example it would allow controlled, limited load shedding which is probably a key feature to make the grid more effective.

The aggressive build out of Renewable Energy Sources will potentially challenge the current grid operations significantly. There will be needs to balance load and generation as they are typically not matched. The location of generation and consumption can be in very different parts of the grid too. Balancing of base load generation by coal, oil and nuclear with Wind, Solar and Biomass will be needed as it challenges the current ecosystem. Possibly new financial models for utilities will emerge. It is quiet possible that Green Energy will be more valuable than traditional Energy, therefore the access to Green Energy will be a key driver.

There are many open issues and an industry acceptable implementation has to be developed. This needs a lot of definitions, research; knowledge will be generated in collaboration and needs to be distributed. The most exiting part is the journey we are on today. This is the time to be active, be part of it to form the future of our grid.

Clean IT

Green IT is becoming Clean IT...

As I look at the evolution of Green IT, it occurred to me, it is much more transformational than one would have ever guessed. I think there are three buckets typically one could sort Green IT activities into:
- reduction of waste, packaging materials, hazardous materials and such in production, operations and facilities
- holding your vendors to the same Environmental standards as you are (vendor management)
- reduction of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions which is synonymous for Energy savings

The last bullet, GHG reduction, is really interesting, it evolved. At first it was all about upgrading your IT facilities, specifically Air Conditioning and Power Delivery equipment. Then the efficiency of Server Power Supplies was added. Realizing that the majority of IT equipment of an average Enterprise is outside of the Data Center, client compute equipment (specifically desktop PC's and CRT's) got in focus of power supply improvements early on with the first version of E-Star in 1992.

But the power consumption of IT wasn't going down, the ever increasing exponential IT demand used up the improvements and upgrades rather quickly. IT demand seems to have a constant growth rate, a characteristic of an exponential function. The issue with exponential growth is, if you don't know you are on it, it can really surprise you. The initial growth looks slow, after 2/3 of the planned time only 1/3 of the resources are used, so you could think you have plenty to go... But then things start to go really fast, the last 2/3 of resources are getting used up in the remaining 1/3 of the planned time, you could think you are running into a wall with light speed... Sounds familiar?

Data Centers still were filling up, Client equipment still was on and idling over night. A recognition set in that the utilization of IT assets was very low and lead to unnecessary consumption of energy, hence unnecessary emissions of GHG's. But this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cost, IT continues to use an enormous amount of Capital and has significant operational cost associated to manage this exponential growth.

At that point the focus of Green IT became how to optimize the operations of IT to be more efficient. Things like managing client equipment remotely with tools allowing to enforce Power management and shutdown at night; using virtualization, thin provisioning on storage and such to increase the utilization of IT assets in the Data Center. Aside from the Energy savings a reduction in complexity and associated costs are observed.

With better policies around IT utilization in place (or getting in place), the next improvement was possible, bringing Moore's law into the Physical IT world, e.g. Data Centers and Offices. Moore's law is an exponential function by itself, and with the right policies on refresh and utilization of IT equipment it can offset the exponential IT demand growth. For Data Centers, that requires a rethinking of how they are used and build, but also has the promise of no more additional power and space needed. With that, no more additional GHG's. And a significant reduction in cost all around. Most Data Centers today are not built and operated with that in mind.

What Green IT drives now is an industrialization of IT operations, it is a cleaner way in all respects to run IT with less pollution, less complexity, less use of resources, less expensive.

Green IT is becoming Clean IT!

Wind turbines as far as the eye can see

You don’t believe me, right? Well, in Texas everything is bigger, so they say. And for Wind Energy, absolutely. Driving to Lubbock, TX from Austin, TX is quite an experience. Making the journey at night is even better. When you hit I-20 east of Abilene, TX you start to see some red lights in the dark sky, here and there in small clusters. You could think these are antennae or cell towers. As you make it through Sweetwater, TX and turn onto US-84 you get reminded of some Sci-Fi movies. As far as the eye can see red synchronize blinking lights in the dark sky, hundreds. It is surreal, never have I seen anything like it. To further my confusion once in a while an overwhelming smell came through the A/C. As I drove the first time I had no idea what all of this was, until next morning. Wind turbine installations on every rim and ledge and high plain for optimized wind capturing. And in between oil and gas wells (that's the smell), cotton farms and room for solar. The wind and sun are there plenty, and transmission lines for the wind energy too (though need to be more). Wind blows on the edges of the day typically, so solar energy can use during the midday the same transmission lines with really no congestion… Driving to Lubbock and its Texas Tech University made it clear to me:

Texas, the Sustainable Energy State.

Texas is oil, yes and it has build up a true global technology leadership all around it. Texas is Wind, and it is Solar. Texas is bio mass. Texas is marine and land based technologies, and has hydro along the Colorado River. And it is building up technology leadership all around these areas too.

Texas is Energy, sustainable.

What a place to be in today’s times, it’s all here, great technology with it’s leading Universities, Energy and High Tech companies and entrepreneurs, a unique infrastructure as Texas has its own electric grid (ERCOT); some of the best places nature has for all of these energy forms; and its people. If y’all not from Texas, look up the amazing history of the Alamo, that will explain it. And as they say, it all comes Texas sized! Don’t believe me? Today Texas has approximately 1/3 of the US wind generation (8/24/09: OK I rounded up, it's 28.4% according to http://www.awea.org/projects).

Operationalize Green

When I talk to companies the need for Green is usually not an issue anymore, which is great! But it seems a lot of organizations are in the midst of trying to figure out how to opperationalize green. I think that's a very natural flow of events, as Green has been for most an initiative, and successful initiatives are becoming part of daily operations.

There are tools helping you to track your progress. For most organizations Green house gas emissions are the #1 issue they try to address, as there are potential cost coming e.g. in form of carbon taxes.

Energize and provide focus to your organizations, set a bold target. Once you have figured out where your energy is used (remember the Energy audit) you can start taking action. I would expect that the biggest opportunities might not be in the factories as they have been under constant productivity improvement pressure for decades. And as IT becomes more pervasive in companies, with typically low utilization rates and missing energy management systems, IT should show up as one of your highest payback items.

So focusing on CO2 here is one way to get there:

• Have a plan and a vision, be bold and specific
  – “Zero CO2 and 100% renewable energy by 2011”
  – Don’t fall into the trap that Green is expensive and you have to do it all yourself
• The highest impact is changing your policies
  – Buy renewable Energy
  – Buy recyclable and recycled materials
  – Specify efficiencies (e.g. 95% efficient power supplies) and make it part of the RFQ
  – Set goals for ROTC/ROI* for all Green investments, including IT
• Create a Dashboard with Green Indicators e.g.
  – Total Enterprise % power consumed on off hours, find your minimum, eliminate energy waste relentlessly (Power management on everything, PC's, A/C, lighting, etc.)
  –IT utilization, ROTC, OPEX
  – % power from renewable sources
  – % materials recyclable/recycled
  – Etc.
• Invest in Green with high ROTC
  – Have others help you
  – E.g. Renewable Power is easier to buy than to generate

These steps should get you closer to opperationalize Green in your Enterprise!

*ROTC return on total capital /ROI return on investment

Green Enterprise, Race for Carbon Neutral Energy

I was asked the other day a pretty simple question: What is a Green Enterprise? I was thinking there are so many definitions of Green; this can be a rather exhausting answer… I came up with this definition:

The Green Enterprise is using the least amount of resources possible to produce high quality products, and maximizes the use of renewable resources in that process.

=> The Green Enterprise is the Productive and Sustainable Enterprise!

There are a lot of ways to describe and define this, and granted it is a complex subject. But I thought the above is capturing the essence of what Green wants to achieve. In simple words:
It’s all about Productivity and Sustainability. And that’s not only good for the environment. Highly efficient production methods produce better balance sheets. If the amount of energy and materials used is minimal, the use of renewable sources for both becomes more practical.

I don’t think there are a lot of manufacturing companies which haven’t embraced the principle of productivity, and if there are areas of excessive use of any resource, the current economic environment will force to take action.

One element of Sustainability which is new is the desire and in some cases the mandate for Carbon Neutrality. The source of your Carbons is mostly your energy usage and where it comes from. There will be a Race for Carbon Neutral Energy, today only 2% of the US electric energy is generated by Wind, Solar and geothermal (http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_energy.html). Hydro Electric generation is about 7% and really not growing much… So if you wait too long, there isn’t any Green Energy to buy… and it will get expensive. So act now, here is how:

Three steps to Carbon Neutrality:

1. Identify your energy (energy audit)
a. Where is it used, for what
b. Efficiencies and cost
c. What sources
2. Group in three actions:
a. Eliminate
b. Reduce
c. Convert to renewable energy sources
3. Take Action
a. Create CO2 enterprise dash board
b. Identify ROI (return on investment) and TCO (total cost of ownership) on all actions
c. Develop and track deployment plan
d. Generate quick wins first

When you go through your assessment you’ll find that IT might be your biggest area of potential efficiency gains, more in my next Blog