With financial market turmoil, a focus on cost savings, an energy crisis and demands to reduce CO2 emissions to address climate change, there has never been a better and more pressing time to invest in green ICT.
The costs associated with traditional services provided by IT departments are coming under increasing pressure from rampant CFOs looking to eliminate waste in the business. In the current economic climate, IT is no longer at liberty to invest in projects that don't offer a measurable ROI, and pay-back periods required by finance are getting smaller and smaller.
In such times however, opportunities arise, particularly for technology solutions that offer real and demonstrable cost savings. Green ICT and technologies associated with energy efficiency and CO2 reductions fall squarely into this space.
Tim James of sustainableIT warns that IT needs to be careful about getting involved in the hype. “It is critically important that IT has an understanding of its baseline costs from an energy perspective before embarking upon such initiatives. At the very least, the technologies and solutions deployed should provide IT with the ability to measure and report on savings on an ongoing basis. If there are no measurements, why bother?” he states.
Two technologies that offer IT real opportunity to save costs are virtualisation (both server and workstation) as well as power management.
At its root, server virtualisation is designed to optimise the use of server infrastructure that typically only runs at between 12% and 20% of its capacity. Virtualisation provides the ability to take multiple workloads, typically run on separate servers and virtualise them on one physical device, using hardware more efficiently and ultimately saving on energy costs, sometimes as much as 80% depending on the virtualisation ratio.
PC virtualisation on the other hand is largely designed around manageability and security, although environmental benefits do include energy saving potential by running thin client devices as well as the opportunity to sweat hardware assets by using them as the devices to connect to the virtualised infrastructure in the data centre, thus eliminating unwanted e-waste. A virtualised desktop looks and feels identical to a normal user desktop; it is just virtualised in the data centre with the associated security and management benefits.
James believes that organisations that have not embarked on a virtualisation strategy should be doing so now. The ROI is easy to demonstrate in terms of cost and energy savings but there is much additional value to be gained by deploying these solutions in the form of cost-effective disaster recovery, high availability, security and operational savings.
Another green solution that offers IT an opportunity to reduce costs immediately is enterprise PC power management. These solutions provide IT with the ability to control the power state of workstations through centralised infrastructure based on policies. “An average PC and monitor left on the majority of the time can consume as much as 1000 kilowatt hours per annum and cost a company around R500 to run,” states James. Utilising enterprise PC power management technologies, these costs can be cut in half and payback periods are usually less than 12 months. The real value however is that cost savings flow immediately.
Again, there are spin-off benefits in deploying such solutions. By being able to control the state of a device, be it powered up (through wake-on-lan or vPro), or powered down, IT can increase patching success levels by always ensuring that the device is in the correct state to receive the patch, James concludes.
In today's economic climate, there has never been a better time to start looking at these types of technologies more seriously and reinventing the way traditional IT service is provided.
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