Centre for Information and Communications Technology

ICT 317 : ICT Sustainability

Week 3 Collaboration for Green IT

Lamb, J. 2009, The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a
Difference for the Environment, IBM Press
3 March 2014
Green IT

Lamb, J. 2009, The Greening of IT: How Companies
Can Make a Difference for the Environment, IBM Press

Collaboration
To meet the challenge for effective green IT

Between:
IT technology vendors, data center design
businesses, infrastructure technology providers,
energy utilities, and governments

Aim is to understand why collaboration is important and
how to make this collaboration happen



3 March 2014
IT Technology Vendors
Between big tech giants
This collaboration should result in a better range of energy-efficient
products (hardware and software)
are collaborating by discussing what works and what does not

Examples:
HP, IBM, and Sun are sitting at the same table to work out green
standards with The Green Grid
Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories such as Lawrence Berkeley
National Labs and Pacific Northwest National Labs are cooperating in
development of research and best practices for green IT.
Government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
are leading the effort to standardize metrics to measure energy
consumption

3 March 2014
IT Technology Vendors
IBM Contribution:

energy-management software, energy certificates program, and
an energy benchmark
For energy measurement: Active Energy Manager software to
measure power usage of key elements of the data center, from
IT systems to chilling and air-conditioning units.
Project Big Green helped more than 2,000 clients implement
green initiatives that have helped to reduce cost and
environmental impact.
recycled more than one billion pounds of IT equipment removed
from clients data centers

3 March 2014
Data Center Design and Build
Businesses

The Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org/)
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air
Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)
(http://www.ashrae.org/)
The Uptime Institute is a consortium of data center
operators (http://uptimeinstitute.org/)
Association for Computer Operations Management
(AFCOM) (http://www.afcom.com/)
Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) (http://www.ase.org/)





3 March 2014
The Green Grid
founded in 2007
primary mission: to further data center energy-efficiency initiatives
Members:
IT equipment and component manufacturers
manufacturers of facility support equipment
data center operators and designers
drive the development of
metrics that provide a meaningful measure of data center energy
utilization and performance,
standard protocols to facilitate collection, sharing, and reporting
of power and thermal data from IT and facilities equipment, and
design and operating strategies that promote optimal data center
energy use.
published a collection of white papers on data center metrics and
data management. .

3 March 2014
ASHRAE

publishes a set of documents and manuals that provide
data centers with

cooling strategies that optimize cooling delivery,
data center temperature, and humidity profiles,
maximize the cooling delivered per unit of energy
applied


3 March 2014
The Uptime Institute
focuses on tools and strategies to maintain the
serviceability and reliability of data centers
sets various data center performance levels through the
tier system, which dictates equipment redundancy and
data center environment criteria to maintain a specified
level of system availability
Uptime has been adding energy optimization, as well as
other critical criteria for data center operation and
reliability, which needs to be factored in when
considering data center reliability and availability.
3 March 2014
AFCOM
involved in data center and energy-efficiency activities
provides education and resources for data center
managers
It devotes a portion of its efforts to assisting data center
managers to identify energy-efficiency activities

3 March 2014
Alliance to Save Energy

associated with energy-efficiency activities
mission:
promotes energy efficiency worldwide to achieve a
healthier economy, a cleaner environment, and
greater energy security
3 March 2014
Collaboration of Building Energy Management and IT
Energy Management:

Building automation systems (BAS) and Energy
management systems (EMS)
IT departments operate in an environment
surrounded by sophisticated data acquisition,
analyses, and networking systems of which IT itself is
largely unaware



3 March 2014
A third of U.S. energy consumption comes from
commercial buildings
Businesses are automating those buildings to reduce
costs and emissions
Will IT lead, or follow, the coming change?
IT can have a green impact on a companys energy and
emissions:
start with the data center;
manage desktop energy use;
enable mobility
3 March 2014
Building automation systems
brains of commercial and industrial buildings that control
their own environments
mainly, lighting and temperature controls
Benefits:
energy savings, improved occupant comfort, added
security and safety, and reduced maintenance costs

3 March 2014
Energy management systems
Central control of lighting, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning
with the goal of reducing the energy consumption
Almost every campus (corporate, medical, or academic) has an
EMS
Manufacturers have adopted automation for efficiency for industrial
systems
Next:
how the EMS and IT worlds should converge?
The concepts center around removing the long-standing wall
between building networks and IT (tenant) networks
Other systems common in most buildings
For security, air quality, and life safety

3 March 2014
Energy management systems
Information is the fourth utility after electricity, gas, and water
Cisco has proposed moving EMS to the IP network, not only for
efficiency, but also for the information synergies involved
Business information has a strategic and tactical value, and
information about the buildings performance is no different.
Protocols:
Building systems operate on largely special-purpose open
systems (such as BACnet or LonWorks), and a few proprietary
systems remain popular.
both types of systems can talk to the IP network through
gateways
Within the last few years, the building-control industry has
discovered XML. Middleware applications gather information and
normalize it for consumption by ERP, accounting, and other
enterprise applications.
3 March 2014
Collaborating with Energy Utilities
Electric utilities provide incentives for their customers to move to
green IT
For example, the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) has
worked with several IT vendors to consolidate its servers, and
the company has developed new ways to measure and reduce
heat in data centers.
They announced this initiative at a conference, where companies
such as American Power Conversion Corp. (APC), Eaton Corp.,
General Electric Consumer & Industrial, IBM, and others
gathered to discuss green computing and power-saving
initiatives.
PG&E teamed with IBM Research to develop a tool to measure
the three-dimensional temperature distributions in its data
centers

3 March 2014
Collaborating with Energy Utilities
IBM used its new Mobile Measurement Technology (MMT) to survey
the relevant physical parameters of PG&E data centers and
visualize (via 3-D images) hot spots, air leakage, and other
inefficiencies
The data was then used to build customized thermal and energy
models to help mitigate hot spots and rectify imbalances within the
data center
PG&E was the first company to offer incentives for power-saving
technologies, encouraging customers to get rid of underutilized
computing and data storage equipment through virtualization.
In addition, the company recently spearheaded a coalition of utilities
to discuss and coordinate energy-efficiency programs for the high-
tech sector, focusing on data centers.
3 March 2014
Pacific Gas and Electric Company
business tools offered by Pacific Gas and Electric
Company
Energy Usage
Billing History
Rate Comparison Tools
Energy Outage and Restoration Status
Billing Details
Account Aggregation

3 March 2014
Collaborating with Government Agencies
EPA
US EPA ENERGY STAR data center rating system:
ENERGY STAR building program
data center rating system
variation of the PUE (Power Usage Efficiency)
the rating system consider the percent of equipment
that utilizes virtualization technology and power
management and measuring technology
began soliciting data centers to test the rating system.

3 March 2014
Collaborating with Government Agencies
EU Code of Conduct for data centers:
published in 2008
publication to help improve energy efficiency in data
centers

Other geographies: Australia is beginning to talk about
initiating a data center energy-efficiency effort and has
contacted IBM representatives about participating in
such a program.

3 March 2014
Collaboration Within Your Own Company
The Uptime Institute recommended five issues for both short- and
long-term energy savings for data center:

Server consolidation, configuration, virtualisation
Enabling power-save features on servers
Turning off dead servers (no longer in use but running)
Pruning bloat ware (the application efficiency issue)
Improving the site infrastructure energy-efficiency ratio

By this,
data centers can improve energy savings by 25 percent to 50
percent over a two-year period


3 March 2014
Collaboration Within Your Own Company
The Uptime Institute has developed a multifunctional team
methodology known as Integrated Critical Environment (ICE)

A tried-and-true method
send an e-mail to all users announcing server shutdown for
maintenance for a 24-hour period
Active server users rebel instantly with reasons why their servers
cant be shut down
If no angry responses result, shut them off indefinitely and then
disconnect the servers
This frees up space, energy, and manpower


3 March 2014
Collaboration Within Your Own Company
Active participation, support, and collaboration are
required from five key individuals:
representatives from the offices of the
CFO
CIO
real estate and facilities
data center IT, and facilities managers, and
the technical teams who deal with applications and
IT solutions for your company

3 March 2014
Collaboration and Carbon Trading
Governments usually have the role of regulating carbon emissions
through systems such as cap and trade.
In a cap and trade system:
the regulatory body sets a limit or cap on the amount of pollutant
a company can emit.
Companies are issued emission permits (the right to emit a
specific amount)
The total of allowances and credits cannot exceed the cap (the
total emissions).
Companies that need to increase emissions can buy credits from
companies that pollute less.
A purchase of credits is the trade

3 March 2014
Summary and Conclusions
IT vendors have started to offer a significant set of integrated
hardware, software, and services offerings to help customers
improve their energy-management initiatives.
Industry organizations are establishing efficiency metrics at the
server and data center level to integrate facilities and IT resources.
The EPA is establishing efficiency metrics at the server level as an
extension to its ENERGY STAR workstation metrics.
Many IT companies are addressing the situation from end to end: at
the servers end through power management features, and at the
data centers end through integrated IT/facilities modular solutions.
The required collaboration for green IT is a part of the overall global
collaboration required to solve the climate crisis

3 March 2014