Rack Pack Blog

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye – why it will pay to turn to Green IT

Posted by Rack Packer - 06/08/10 at 11:08:34 am

Waves have been making, well, waves this week.

Google announced that it will no longer being investing in further development of Wave, the much heralded collaborative working application which was eventually going to replace email. Whilst some commentators have been quick to point out that this does not mean that Google Wave is dead (the code is available as opensource), it certainly appears to have crashed against the rocks.

The company has also recently been in the news for another ‘natural element’ themed story. Google Energy recently announced an agreement to purchase 114 megawatts of wind power capacity per year for 20 years at a set price from an Iowa wind farm owned and operated by NextEra Energy Resources. Google spokesperson, Jamie Yood, stated: “This is the first contract for Google Energy. We plan on exploring other opportunities to provide our data centers with environmentally friendly power in 2010. It isn’t limited to wind power.”

Which links nicely to the other major wave story of the week, and one which centres on a 12 tonne mollusc shaped ‘socket’ that has been laid on the seabed off the north coast of Cornwall. The Wave Hub is a marine testing facility that is designed to connect wave power with the national grid. The Hub will consist of a cable distribution unit connected to arrays of wave energy devices floating on or just below the surface.

This project is seen as a vital element in the UK’s renewable energy programme. The UK has some of the largest wave and tidal energy resources in Europe. Allowing for technical, practical and environmental limitations, wave energy alone could potentially generate up to 15% of the UK’s electricity consumption. By 2020 the wave energy market in the UK could be worth £0.2 billion.

The UK Government is committed to increasing the amount of electricity generated by renewable energy sources to 10% by 2010 and 15% by 2015, with an aspiration to reach 20% by 2020. The hope is that renewables will help to address increasingly important energy and environmental issues surrounding the continued use of traditional and fossil fuels.

For the Hosting and Data Centre industries, the availability of readily available renewable energy is going to be vital to its long term viability.

The UK Government Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, caused widespread consternation this week, when in his first annual energy statement he indicated that UK energy bills by 2020 are expected to increase by one percent domestically, but might rise by as much as 43 percent for businesses, as national policies are implemented aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

The IT industry is responsible for around 2% of the world’s carbon emissions and data centers are the fastest growing part of that footprint. It’s estimated that the average data centre uses as much electricity as 4,000 homes annually, so the Industry could be set for some hefty increases in its fuel bills - increases which will inevitably be passed on to customers.

And it’s this cost that is now, rather unsurprisingly, focusing the minds of tech companies everywhere on how it can be contained and reduced. Renewables will play a major part in reducing environmental impact but operational efficiency will be vital in reducing actual energy consumption.

Pike Research in its recently issued report “Green Data Centers” claims that energy efficiency now has a “major emphasis” at IT firms, and that investment in data centres will increase from $7.5bn (£4.7bn) this year to $41.4bn (£26bn) in five years’ time. The report also suggests that green server farms will account for 28% of the entire market.

Pike Research analyst Eric Woods stated: “But as datacentre energy costs become more visible, the financial benefits of moving to a greener mode of operation are being recognised.”

And it’s not hard to see why the future is suddenly changing its hue from orange to green. Usage stats pulled from one of our data centres, combined with an average server utilisation of less than 10%, suggest that the average server is costs anywhere between £8 and £12 per month in energy costs for simply being plugged in, powered and cooled. If your IT estate runs to a couple of hundred servers, you could potentially be losing £26K per annum on wasted power costs. Become more operationally efficient and reduce your servers by 50% and you add £13K straight to the bottom line.

One long standing criticism of the industry has been that it has only really focused on the low hanging fruits, that it has paid no more than lip service to changing its operational methods, but perhaps we will now see a ‘sea change’ in the way we tackle the issues. Advances in technology such as unified communications, virtualisation and cloud computing coupled with the availability of renewable energy sources present the industry with many of the ingredients required to genuinely reduce costs.

If organisations won’t adopt a more environmentally-friendly attitude themselves, seeing the ‘all things green’ as the preserve of the eco warrior and the tree hugger, then perhaps the threat of a near 50% increase in power costs will grab their attention.

Oil’s well for Green IT or are we chasing a broken pipe dream?

Posted by Rack Packer - 16/06/10 at 03:06:29 pm

Green issues and spills have been dominating the headlines this week (and surprisingly not all of them refer to the performance of a certain English goalkeeper). From the Gulf of Mexico Oil disaster and ensuing diplomatic fall out, to the news that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has launched its Energy Star program for data centers and an analysis of the economic impact of the American Power Act (APA), released by Senators Kerry and Lieberman mid-May.

 

It is no surprise that much of the coverage of this week has focused on the need to move away from our dependence on fossil fuels- to break our oil addiction - to ‘cleaner’ renewable energy sources and the need for us to use the energy that we consume more efficiently and effectively.

 

President Obama in his first Oval Office address appeared to use the public outrage over the Gulf’s oil crisis to leverage momentum for his personal goal of a greener energy future. He laid out his plans to deal with BP and then exhorted his countrymen to embark on a mission to reduce their reliance on fossil fuel. A task which may not be as farfetched as it appears on the surface, if the results of the EPA study are to be believed.

 

The EPA analysis concluded that the APA is not only affordable, but a worthy investment. For a relatively modest sum, between 22 to 40 cents per day through 2050, American households would be able to fund the creation of clean energy jobs, a reduction in the dependence on oil and protection of the planet, and polls suggest that this might be palatable to US residents. And apparently it’s not just householders that are showing broad support for the need to act on climate change.

 

A survey undertaken amongst the SME community by the Small Business Majority, a research, education and advocacy organization, showed that 61 percent of small businesses surveyed, agree that a move to clean energy can restart the economy and help small businesses create jobs, and that half of the small businesses support clean energy and climate legislation.

 

Which is all fine and dandy, voicing our support (or lack of it) for a greener world in a telephone interview is a lot easier than actually doing something tangible. And herein lies the problem – what exactly can we do or what should we be doing and how will we benefit? If we are serious about changing the way we currently operate, then we need to break the mould, challenge and change our entrenched business practises and actually stop talking the talk and start walking the walk.

 

As a huge guzzler of energy, the IT industry often finds itself an easy Green target, hence the introduction of the EPAs Energy Star scheme. In the US, for example, data centres consumed less than 1% of total US electricity use in 2000, but that will rise to at least 2.3% of all electricity used nationwide this year, according to the Uptime Institute. Figures in other parts of the world are comparable.

 

IT departments therefore share a huge task to implement the changes that will reverse this trend. When you broach this topic with companies, most IT professionals and executives will state that they are genuinely concerned about their IT departments’ impact on the environment – or are at least interested in the economic benefits of being more energy efficient.

 

Yet in a BPM Forum survey, while 86% of respondents said IT organisations have a “responsibility to substantially improve efficiency and green activities”, only 41% had any specific green plans in place. “The biggest overarching message,” Derek Kober, director BPM Forum stated, “was that, despite concern and despite increasing priorities for improving the environment and greening the data centre, IT departments in general are pretty far behind.”

 

This is a view shared by Forrester Research analyst James Staten who stated in the current edition of Green IT Magazine that “IT administrators define green from the hard currency perspective, rather than something that is environmental. They don’t really make a lot of decisions around what’s environmentally responsible or not.” In its last quarterly review, ‘Green progress in enterprise IT’, research conducted by Forrester showed that 38% of enterprises now include respect for the environment among their evaluation criteria and 55% of them put cost reduction at the top of their list of priorities.

 

At the same time, while green IT has become a very topical subject, it seems there are a range of views about what constitutes ‘green IT. On the one hand, there is the argument that it is primarily a bottom-line focused activity that also helps save the planet. On the other hand, there is the view that almost every new initiative nowadays has been ‘green washed’ and that not nearly enough is being done to actually improve our planet’s condition.

 

Separating green facts from green fiction often results in inaction. With so much green spin and misinformation out there, it’s little wonder that many organisations have become sceptical of green technology, not because of any indifference to the plight of the environment, but because they are not at all sure who to trust. Which green products and solutions really are green? And, even if you are sure of the authenticity of the environmental claims being made by certain vendors on behalf of their own particular offerings, how sure can you be that they are operating within a green supply chain?

 

“Green IT has to be about more than presenting a nice picture to the market or senior management,” stated research outfit Redemtech president Robert Houghton. “It has to be sustainable, both environmentally and financially. That requires applying the same processes and discipline to these programmes as are used in other areas of the business.”

 

One thing we do not need is more rhetoric. According to research by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University oil demand is now outstripping supply and we need to invest quickly in alternative energy sources. Kuwaiti Scientists have recently released a report which found that worldwide conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014, years earlier than anticipated and that the world’s oil reserves are being depleted at a rate of 2.1 percent a year.  A fact not lost on Bill Gates who called this week for the US Government to invest billions of dollars a year in R&D bring about a clean energy revolution. With 80 percent of today’s primary energy demand coming from fossil fuels, we need to start taking action now.

 

In an odd way, the environmental disaster occurring in the Gulf might be the very catalyst that the world needs to wake up and start addressing the very real issues that we face. Even if you do not believe that climate change is a direct result of man’s actions, or that climate change even exists, they’re can be no denying that fossil fuels are a finite resource, and if we are to avoid the situation where we simply can’t power the information super highway, we need to take ‘Green IT’, in all its forms, seriously.

 

What we need is common sense, we need honesty, we need greater investment in green technologies that are economically compelling and more than anything we need to overcome our general inertia. We must not drop this particular ball (unlike a certain English Goalkeeper).

Will Cloud Computing lead to Global Smog?

Posted by Rack Packer - 30/03/10 at 03:03:34 pm

New Greenpeace Report claims coal fuels much of the cloud’s growth

 

Today has seen the release of the Greenpeace report: “Make IT Green - Cloud Computing and its contribution to Climate Change” catch the headlines. The report basically claims that the rise of cloud computing is increasingly reliant on the use of dirty fossil fuels and that urgent action needs to be taken to redress the situation.

 

According to the report, Greenpeace claims that the energy consumption and carbon emissions of cloud computing is already significantly higher had been previously estimated. Using carbon emission projection data provided by McKinsey (included within the 2008 study Smart 2020: enabling the low carbon economy in the information age published by the Climate Group) and updating it with data supplied by the Environmental Protection Agency, Greenpeace has concluded that the actual energy consumption of cloud computing is 1.3 times greater than intimated by the Smart 2020 study.

 

Greenpeace’s concerns focus on the fact that should this situation remain unchecked, and with most data centers around the globe using fossil fuels, cloud computing could lead to a real cloud of pollution, revealing that at current growth rates data centers and networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020. This is more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.

 

If considered as a country, global telecommunications and data centers behind cloud computing would have ranked fifth in the world for energy use in 2007, behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan, it concluded

 

The report highlights the data center expansion plans of several global giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple and appears somewhat critical that few of these highlighted companies appear to have pursued renewable energy for their power supply at their facilities.

 

“The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power,” said Greenpeace.

 

The cloud, argues Greenpeace, may be the fastest-growing facet of technology infrastructure between now and 2020, and requires its main exponents to innovate, increase energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lobby Government for a workable renewable energy agenda.

 

“The potential of ICT technologies and cloud computing to drive low-carbon economic growth underscore the importance of building cloud infrastructure in places powered by clean renewable energy. Companies like Facebook, Google, and other large players in the cloud computing market must advocate for policy change at the local, national and international levels to ensure that, as their appetite for energy increases, so does the supply of renewable energy.” concluded Greenpeace.

 

So are the arguments highlighted in the report valid? Will cloud computing lead to smog?

 

On the face of it this particular report is accurate, and no one can argue that Industry (not just the data center/technology industry) needs to address the issue of renewable energy and a move away from reliance on fossil fuels, but it could equally be argued that this report is somewhat ‘one eyed’ in its approach.

 

In an ideal world we would all use renewable energy sources but at the current moment in time this situation is idealistic. Most data center operators are utilising facilities that were built in less enlightened times and simply plug into the grid offered by their utility or power provider and are therefore often faced with ‘Hobson’s Choice’ as to the mix of fossil vs. renewable energy offered. Whilst companies with the financial clout of Google might be able to enter the power utility space, for many other cloud operators this is simply not an option.

 

One recognises that the Greenpeace, with its wholly admirable intentions in issuing this report, is seeking leadership from the global IT giants in its bid to move renewable energy up the public agenda, but it should also recognise that the DC industry as a whole, not just the IT super powers, is generally aware of its responsibilities and is genuinely seeking to reduce its impact where it can.

 

In the report, Greenpeace claims that seeking energy efficiency, whilst to be commended, is not enough but for many smaller operators, faced with legacy builds, it is a start and a major one.

 

It is an undeniable fact that the raw energy consumed by the data center is both the biggest financial cost overhead and is easily the largest contributor to the facility’s carbon footprint. But whilst acknowledging that power supply is obviously vital, there are many other major considerations to take into account when building out a new DC facility – internet/network connectivity being one rather important one for example.  

 

The report correctly claims that Cloud computing is growing, and so too are the data centers that are supporting its growth, but what it does not appear to mention is the overall net effect on energy consumption  as disparate server farms are closed and replaced by moving business processes to the cloud. Many companies taking advantage of the benefits of the cloud are effectively outsourcing their existing IT infrastructure and no longer have a need to own or maintain servers.

 

Logic would suggest that one hundred companies ridding themselves of their own in-house maintained and cooled servers in exchange for utilising one single cloud operator’s infrastructure would lead to an overall reduction in carbon emissions. Analysts at IDC estimate that for every $1.00 spent on new hardware, an additional $0.50 is spent on power and cooling. By implementing a more efficient cooling solution e.g. a single DC rather than a 100 server rooms, fitted with the latest cooling technology, the amount of energy consumed must be reduced.

 

Even acknowledging the tough current economic conditions, it is no surprise that IDC reckons that in 2009 the overall server market declined by 18.9 per cent as many companies consolidated and outsourced their computing requirements.

 

In addition to the physical building and plant economies of scale that cloud computing offers, much effort is currently being expended by cloud providers on the utilisation of virtualisation technologies within the DC.  The cloud service provider can add real value here through scale and through the dedicated technological expertise offered. Underpowered virtual servers can fail to meet an organization’s processing needs, and over-engineered systems can waste money and energy. There is also a real potential for server sprawl to occur with a badly planned and implemented virtualisation project but this is mitigated when handled on a purpose built cloud platform.

 

Likewise the use of “energy proportional” operational techniques is growing amongst cloud service providers, which basically manages ‘spikey’ computing power activity - from idle to peak load - at its most energy efficient.

 

And of course we shouldn’t over look the fact that the very nature of cloud computing can lead to other environmental benefits as well, the web applications hosted in a data center may allow thousands of people to telecommute instead of travelling to offices and meetings thus reducing the carbon footprint further.

 

If we are to truly assist the environment by building greener data centers - and given that it has also been said that the ‘greenest data center is the one that we don’t have to build’ - we need to pursue a holistic approach which looks at every aspect of the services that the cloud offers not just the raw power supply.

 

If utilised effectively, cloud computing offers organisations the opportunity to reduce their energy consumption, renewable or otherwise, and surely overall energy reduction rather than energy replacement is a long term goal that will be of benefit to everyone.

iomart Hosting Control Panel Upgraded to include CO2 Emission data

Posted by Rack Packer - 15/09/09 at 09:09:48 am

The issue of Green IT and Carbon Footprint is never far from the front pages at the moment, and as the world’s Governments seek to introduce legislative carbon accounting in order to achieve their publicly quoted CO² reduction targets, it is a subject that is not going to disappear sometime soon. Eventually, carbon reduction will affect every business and we will all be held to account for our organisation’s footprints. With this in mind, and to assist our colocation customers with their energy efficiency planning, we have added a personal CO² Emissions display to the control panel, and we believe that we are the first managed hosting company to provide such data. Initially the data highligted applies to the CO² emissions produced by the individual servers within each rack (based upon actual power consumed). We are now working on calculating the additional server power usage, and CO² released, by the Data Centre Infrastructure e.g. cooling to provide a more thorough and accurate picture.

iomart Hosting bags PC Pro Environmental Innovator Award Nomination

Posted by Rack Packer - 18/08/09 at 09:08:13 am

iomart Hosting is delighted to announce that it has received a nomination for Environmental Innovator of the Year from the Editorial Team at PC Pro. The PC Pro Awards are now firmly established as an integral and keenly anticipated part of the IT industry calendar, and are considered amongst the most prestigious of the Industry gongs.

iomart Hosting has been nominated in the Environmental Innovator category. This is one of five awards which are the gift of the PC Pro editorial team: three are focused on business, and voted for by PC Pro’s team of Real World Contributing Editors, one for Environmental Innovator of the Year (decided by PC Pro and Sustain IT), and one for Technology Innovator of the Year (decided by the extended PC Pro editorial team, with over 20 people casting a vote).

Other companies nominated in the Environmental Innovator category are: Asus, Gigabyte, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson & VeryPC - pretty top companyand we’re delighted to be included! iomart hosting was nominated for the development of it’s Managed Hosting control panel which details customer power usage and consumption direct from the data centre.

The awards will be presented at a pucker black tie do at London’s Hurlingham Club on the 30th September.