Economics trumps IT greenwashing

Enterprises are being assaulted by a bewildering array of new and old IT products suddenly purporting to be green and good for the planet. "Many new green features are the same features that weren't green before, so how come they're green now?" says Drue Reeves, VP of research at the Burton Group, a Midvale, UT-based IT consultancy. Saving the world is quite a different proposition from the more mundane task of saving money on energy. Appeals to altruism to sell products are muddying the issues. "Green computing has never been about ecological responsibility - it's always been about money saved," says Reeves. The business of business is profit, and the only green that counts is money. Do vendors' holier-than thou claims of greenery even live up to more modest expectations of energy efficiency? Do the math Few green computing technologies reduce energy costs dramatically. Server virtualization, for example, appears to be an energy efficiency no-brainer. The ratios are about eight to 12 servers per virtual machine, so consolidation should cut energy costs, and it does - but not as much as many imagine. Reeves points out that replacing say, 1000 servers, might cost about $3.5 million, but total energy savings for such an outlay would be about $35,000 annually, assuming rates of 4 cents per kilowatt. "Most of our customers come in with the expectation that they'll save money by replacing all their servers, and they're deflated when we tell them that's not the case," he says. "It makes sense to replace them at the end of their life cycles with new energy-efficient models - but that will happen anyway, as you won't be able to buy inefficient ones in the future." There are also labour costs and other factors to consider in the virtualization equation, as complexities and security concerns are introduced, says Gary Audin, president at Arlington, VA-based consultancy Delphi Inc. "How do you manage programs when they're running all over the place? How do you ensure performance? If you have multiple servers running different jobs at different times, are they all equally secure? These questions aren't being discussed." Like virtualization, there are many other technologies that are helpful in chipping away at energy costs, but aren't easy, bigbang solutions. "Liquid cooling for server racks is over-hyped," says Reeves. "We hear from our customers again and again that it's not as efficient as they thought." On the network front, major vendors are touting energy savings per port of their next-generation platforms. "But if you look at the watts saved per port, you'll find the savings are tens of watts or less, and it takes thousands of kilowatts to get any real savings." Ancient technologies such as tape storage are now being touted as green, as are tiered storage strategies. "Tiered storage is more about data management than energy efficiency. The assumption is that SATA drives are greener because they spin less fast, but you'd have to extrapolate that over millions of disks to save a bit of energy." But IT vendors aren't the only ones jumping on the green bandwagon. Their customers are doing it too, says Reeves. About half of the Burton Group's clients seeking green advice are motivated by energy savings, but the other half are driven by internal politics. "The CIO has gotten a directive from his CEO to be more green, because he wants to promote the company as green so customers will feel better about buying their products." CEOs may not necessarily be dissuaded even after the CIO comes back with a big price tag, he speculates. "It's possible that the value of being perceived as green is greater than the money to upgrade the system, if it costs a few million but they get tens of millions of customers buying their product." Google, Inc., for example, has earned green goodwill points for building a data centre near renewable energy sources such as the Columbia River in Oregon. Other more radical approaches, such as generating a data centre's own energy with solar panels or wind power, are too impractical or unreliable, he says. "There's no new revolutionary architecture going forward. The state of the art is tackling energy costs piecemeal: enterprises have to look at their systems from energy delivery to distribution to IT infrastructure to gain efficiencies in these areas." Do the math, again But energy costs are growing dramatically, and many regions will soon face paying unpredictable market rates for electricity. In his home state of Maryland, businesses have already received their marching orders from utilities, and most US states are following suit, says Matt Brunk, president of Telecomworx, an infrastructure services company. "Rates are going up 15 per cent annually, and we convert to market rates in 2011," he says. While Canada's rates are still set artificially low, this state of affairs can't last much longer, says Bill St. Arnaud, chief research officer at Ottawa-based CANARIE Inc., Canada's advanced research and education network. "This is one of the things that is hurting Canada. We'll be in very bad shape when we eventually do have to raise prices, and we have to start adjusting now." But even in the US, large enterprises haven't changed their mindsets, assumptions or business practices in many areas to adjust to rising energy costs, says Audin. Procurement is one critical area. "When I talk to VARs, the biggest thing missing in RFPs is energy requirements. Companies still don't buy that way yet - they talk about the voltage that needs to delivered to devices, but not the power supply of the equipment itself." Many factors are still missing in computations of power savings recouped from new gear, he says. "I've seen many reports that understate the actual costs. People use average utility costs, but don't factor in energy price increases or inflation. Energy savings will grow 10-20 per cent annually from now on." Power savings from avoided costs of cooling are also frequently overlooked. "For every watt of power used, you need .86 for cooling. So this nearly doubles power savings." Wiring closets are also often missing from equations, he says. "Closets can have as much energy consumption in aggregate as data centres. These are becoming more power and cooling locations because people keep adding stuff to them, but they're not factoring them into energy calculations, and doing a poor job of planning Power over Ethernet (PoE)." In the long run, all these energy bits will add up, so attention should be paid to the significant differences in power requirements for different vendors' network gear, he says. "The differences in consumption of LAN switches and edge routers can be as much as 150 per cent. In a position paper by Nortel Networks showing side by side comparisons of Nortel and Cisco Systems products, the Nortel router's energy savings were 92 per cent, which is huge." Brunk agrees that Nortel gear tends to be more energy-efficient than Cisco. "Cisco's switches are energy hogs. Nortel's consume 50-60 per cent less power than Cisco. If you look at the numbers, how many ports you have, how many years to recoup costs in life cycle replacements, it makes sense to buy Nortel." The new math "A pox on both their houses," says St. Arnaud, weighing in on the Nortel versus Cisco debacle. "One may be a bit more energy efficient than the other but the difference is insignificant. To me, the focus on equipment is wrong-headed." St. Arnaud explains this is due to what economists call the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate, also referred to as the efficiency paradox. Technology improvements allow for better energy efficiency, but those savings are lost to greater consumption. Improvements in efficiency have done little to reduce actual energy consumption, as consumers take advantage of these gains to drive bigger cars farther, or heat larger homes, according to CIBC World Markets Inc. economist Jeff Rubin. "All green IT products are over-hyped, as they will have a negligible if not the opposite effect intended," says St. Arnaud. "What's needed is a systemic analysis and a better architecture entirely, instead of focusing on the efficiencies of individual components." Finding radical new ways to power data centres is where enterprises can save real money - and this needs to happen very soon, he says. "What's really scaring US enterprises is predictions of power shortages. Experts estimate that 90 per cent of data centres will have severe power disruptions in the next five years. And there are also fears as data centres grow and demands of other industries increase as well, costs of all types of power will go up." But unlike other sectors, the IT industry is in a privileged position, says St. Arnaud. Hydro-electricity sites that are too remote and uneconomical for utilities to develop due to the complexities of long-distance transmission can nevertheless be used as dedicated power sources for data centres. Unlike smelters and car plants, data centres can be more easily moved and sited in remote locations with renewable energy sources. "There are many small dams near James Bay and falls in Manitoba, so you can take the data centre there with optical network connections. The beauty is it won't be competing with other sectors for power - the data centre would essentially have free power." Forward-thinking companies such as Google, Microsoft Corp. and eBay, Inc. are already planning or making moves to these new "zero-carbon" data centres in suitable locations. Iceland is one area that is being eyed by major companies due to its rare combination of vacant land, cheap geothermal energy, and chilly climate that makes cooling a data centre nearly free. British Columbia is another natural candidate, offering many untapped falls in coastal areas and proximity to power-hungry California. While technologies such as virtualization are useful within the current utility model, the zero-carbon data centre approach eliminates the need for it, adds St. Arnaud. "There are legitimate issues around virtualization, but an enterprise could move its servers, unchanged, to the data centre, and would only need to worry about the reliability and security of the data centre itself instead of the machine."

Economics trumps IT greenwashing

News | 04/24/2008 8:45 pm EDT

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