IT consumption surges
Computers may seem “clean” and environmentally friendly, but on a global scale the electricity consumed by technology releases the same amount of CO into the earth’s atmosphere as the airline industry.
To give you a sense of the scale of consumption, Bernard Donnelly, enterprise solution services head at Unisys Africa, says a moderate sized data centre with 100 servers and 10 Terabytes (that’s 10 000Gb) of networked storage uses 1 300MWh/year of energy. “It’s estimated that worldwide data centres represent 2% of global energy consumption.”
Small wonder the IT industry is on a massive push to cut the amount of electricity it uses while still keeping up with demand from customers for ever more powerful machines.
Imi Mosaheb, SA country manager for chip manufacturer AMD, says the drive towards more energy-efficient systems isn’t something that vendors have chosen to do but rather has been created by customer demand. “Customers are looking at the total cost of running their infrastructure, including the cost of the electricity consumed by the computers and the equipment used to cool the computing environment,” he says.
In fact, Eskom is in the bizarre position of asking its customers to use less of its product and is paying subsidies to customers that convert to alternative energy sources, says Donnelly.
The idea of power companies paying customers to use more energy-efficient technology isn’t new, as Tertius Bezuidenhout, global systems engineering manager for sub-Saharan Africa at Sun Microsystems, explains. “We have an agreement with a power company in California that gives its customers a rebate if they replace older systems with our more energy-efficient systems. We’re hoping that a similar scheme can be implemented here.”
Trouble is that while corporate SA understands that power consumption is an issue, many of the bigwigs in the industry who control the buying of technology don’t have a clear picture of how much power is actually consumed. That element is handled by different departments.
Jörg Fischer, CIO of group IT at Standard Bank, lends credence to that view, saying that power consumption is an issue that is gaining in importance for CIOS in SA. He says the growth in power usage has been driven over the past few years by a dramatic increase in the computing power requirements of software applications.
“What used to run on one server in the past now needs between three and 10 servers to deliver the service,” Fischer says. “Our power consumption has ramped up to such an extent that while two years ago we were discussing the possibility of renting out space in our data centres, that’s now firmly off the agenda, driven primarily by concerns about power supply.”
While Fischer and his colleagues at the bank don’t feel they’ll be able to reduce the amount of power they’re using – or even keep consumption at current levels – they’re confident that by being smart they’ll be able to flatten the percentage at which consumption increases.
While the stability of the supply of electricity to facilities is something that companies worry about, Fischer says Standard isn’t just looking at the overall cost of running its IT infrastructure. There are other sources of consumption that need to be taken into account. So the official cost of infrastructure could double in three to five years. In other words, rather than a segmented costing of energy consumption between departments or divisions at the bank, the real cost of running its IT infrastructure would become more apparent. It would no longer be a hidden cost, as was the case previously.
To clarify that point, it could cost more for Standard Bank to power and cool servers over their lifespan due to the increased cost of electricity consumed by IT.
One of the energy-efficiency strategies that many companies are looking at is virtualisation, which allows software applications to share infrastructure and, via that, push up the rate at which machines work.
Bezuidenhout says increasing the amount of work computers are doing is vital in reducing overall power usage. A computer doing twice as much work doesn’t use twice as much power. So it’s in the interests of major companies to run their computers as hard as possible.
But the wisdom of a more energy-efficient approach isn’t as apparent to corporate SA. What seems to be more urgent is the ability to keep infrastructure up and running, if and when power is interrupted.
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