Being green with technology
People – not experts – will typically look at green initiatives as something that involves power usage, paper usage, recycling or maybe reducing the amount of travel needed to do business.
These are important factors but, taken individually, they do not provide an effective solution. They are also not the only variables in the equation.
There is also the problem that most people cannot shake the feeling that being green means being a bit mediaeval in work or lifestyle – and it probably costs money to make it happen.
In fact, smart green practices can save money, more than repaying whatever capital costs are involved in new equipment or policies – not to mention the ethical and reputational concerns of committing to a sustainable business model.
As for being a bit “retro”, it shouldn’t be a step backwards into history to make sure your equipment is set to minimise power usage or the amount of paper that it churns out. It’s only obsolete equipment that doesn’t provide the technology to do this.
To address green projects in a compartmentalised fashion fails because you can’t often make changes to one system without affecting other systems. This is familiar territory for engineers. What has to be considered is a whole ecology of related systems that need to be looked at holistically.
This is why the focus falls today on sustainability. There has to be a balance between what is achieved in one area and what changes that causes in other areas.
As a typical example from the IT world, you can look at how big companies manage their server rooms and data centres. While we have much greater energy efficiency for desktops and screens, a server rack remains a real power hog. Even in power-down mode, a rack will still be drawing as much as 100 W. Each processor will draw about 40 W when running and the disc drives also draw about 7 W, even in idle mode – two or three times that when they spin up.
Multiply this by however many racks are in use and you get to some sizeable figures. For a company like Google, it was worth moving their servers to the state in the US that has the cheapest power.
And it’s not just the racks. According to studies by Microsoft, half the power usage in a data centre goes on cooling. This has resulted in major companies redesigning their floor plans to distribute heat more manageably and even redesign the server racks, after it was found that hot air was coming out the bottom of the rack, due to air pressure build-ups inside the rack.
Marketing material will suggest that virtualisation or cloud computing is an answer. These may be local solutions, but the problem just moves along somewhere else.
If you are conducting a server virtualisation project, you can save on the number of servers. But the remaining servers will be running at 80% capacity and will require more power and cooling. And running your software in a hosted environment just means that another data centre has to increase its overhead.
You can make progress in both these examples, but only if you factor in the complete energy equation. Virtualisation can be very helpful, if you get the maths right.
The good news is that hardware manufacturers are really taking power usage seriously. Great strides have been made in reducing overall usage – admittedly, from quite a low base – and providing a variety of low-power modes that can kick in automatically.
Even software vendors are looking at power – and not just their own needs.
Warren Johnson is Enterprise Product Group lead for Microsoft South Africa. He also sits on a panel for Microsoft head office in Redmond that focuses on green issues and sustainable technology.
“If you buy a piece of software – as a business or as a consumer – you want it to consume the least possible hardware resources while still being functional,” he says. “Every developer team at Microsoft has to look at their code to ensure this happens.
“We have a code efficiency tool that can literally check new product code for the kind of problems that cause CPU spikes and other inefficient run-time issues.”
In fact, just checking code is only one matter. Johnson and his colleagues look at everything from corporate travel to the carbon footprint of manufacturing and even on to the environmental impact of product packaging.
Many big companies are doing this – and not just as a matter of enlightened self-interest.
We all can do this. It’s just a matter of getting the equation right and being smart about being green.
After that, to quote a phrase attributed to the founder of Friends of the Earth: think global, act local.
Green technology discussion
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