Design, Education, Procurement Mgmt: Facets Of Green IT

Green computing is a hot topic among enterprises today with more and more enterprises realising the immediate benefits in terms of cost savings and reduced consumption. In light of all this, Biztech2 spoke to C Mohan, chief technology officer, Reliance Life Insurance, regarding the finer aspects of implementing ‘green technologies’ and some of the issues that crop up during this process.

What are your views on green technologies?

Green issues for organisations are driven by new regulations and a heightened awareness of global warming and environmental pollution. Green technologies in this regard are enablers for organisations to conduct their business activities in an environment-friendly manner.

Today, many IT and non- IT organisations have taken keen and proactive steps towards adopting green technologies through virtualisation of data centres and automation of processes. However, organisations should approach the implementation of these technologies in a strategic manner rather than view these technologies as simply a medium to cut costs.

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At a strategic level, implementation of green technologies should take place as a ‘programme for green IT’, and hence should be planned with due regard to design, education and management.

‘Design’ of the green IT programme should incorporate strategic planning for business process re-engineering, IT infrastructure and system re-engineering, space planning for IT and waste management. ‘Education’ should focus not only on staff training and employee awareness programmes, but should also target increasing public awareness and supplier education. ‘Management of procurement’ should be done with a robust green procurement process based on expense analysis and cost reduction.

Within Reliance ADAG, have you involved the organisation in any kind of energy efficiency initiatives?

Yes, we have an entire range of initiatives when it comes to conservation.

Data Centre Virtualisation

Reliance Life Insurance undertook a Data Centre Virtualisation Project (server consolidation by consolidating 10 Sun servers into 6 and 6 AIX Servers into 3).

Also, migration from traditional IBM 346 servers to HP Blade 4.5 and Dell Blade servers resulted in reduction in power consumption from 21 KVA to 4.5 KVA and 15 KVA to 2.8 KVA respectively.

Lifeline Portal (e-Statements)

Online processing of 200,000 commission statements and 75,000 TDS statements for advisors and renewal statements for over 1000,000 customers enables the company to provide an environment-friendly solution over the Web reducing the usage of paper.

• 2,00,000 e-commission statements contributes by saving approximately 900 kg amount of CO2
• 75,000 e-TDS statements contribute by saving approximately 350 kg amount of CO2.
• 10,00,000 e-renewal alert details contributes by saving approximately 4.5 tonnes amount of CO2.

(Basis of calculation: 1 Ream (500 sheets of paper) releases 2.2 kg of CO2).

Documentum/ Savvion

Implementation of Documentum and Savvion for document retrieval and work flow management for business processes have resulted in huge environmental and financial savings.

Retrieval of an average of 1,07,574 documents through Documentum has resulted in savings of approximately 470 kg of CO2.

Savvion has resulted in the elimination of physical movement of an average of over 2,53,177 contracts annually, resulting in savings of over 14.5 tonnes of CO2.

According to you, how should an enterprise view energy efficiency?

Energy efficiency is best achieved as an enterprise-wide strategy rather than at the data centre level with virtualisation technologies.

Virtualisation technologies enable a single physical server to house multiple, independent operating systems and applications that are logically separated. Today, organisations are leveraging virtualisation within the data centre to achieve better data consumption and overall server utilisation, ultimately enabling server consolidation that results in power, cooling, space and operational efficiencies. Once an organisation has started the journey of deploying energy efficient servers and maximising their utility with virtualisation software, the next wave of energy efficiency will be found in the other infrastructure that makes up the data centre—within the storage, routers, switches, security, etc.

However, real efficiencies are achieved when an organisation adopts a green IT strategy that not only focuses on energy efficiencies, but also energy conservation by adopting methods that minimise the use of paper and thus creating a ‘paperless office’. These strategies work significantly at a business process level through various workflow technologies available today that size the movement of paper through imaging and document retrieval.

Also, it is important that organisations adopt a strategy of deploying customer-facing technologies that minimise the need for written communication with customers, thus, contributing to itself by cutting costs and also contributing to conservation.

What kind of role would the newer energy efficient hardware from vendors play in reducing power consumption within the data centre?

With increased importance and awareness in the IT Industry over the advantages of implementing energy efficient hardware, organisations now realise that deploying newer, energy efficient tools like VMWare coupled with Active Power Management tools results in reduction in hardware and operating costs by 50 percent and reduces energy costs by over 80 percent.

Energy-efficient servers like IBM Power 5/5+/6 series processors and SUN Niagara/Spaarc processors and HP Blade 4.5 and Dell Blade servers help organisations reduce power consumption by over 25 – 30 percent.

With such benefits, organisations today are no longer conservative towards procuring and deploying such technologies within their data centre to achieve not only power consumption reduction but also efficiency of power utilisation.

These technologies will in the long run transform into products that not only help organisations to cut data centre costs but also help reduce the total cost of infrastructure ownership. Coupled with this, energy efficient hardware will eliminate planned downtime for server and storage maintenance with live migration of virtual machines across physical servers and storage arrays.

Please give us your views on some of the means to achieve energy efficiency within enterprises today.

A critical need for enterprises today to achieve energy efficiency is to develop a comprehensive understanding of its energy consumption. Energy and infrastructure costs fall into the responsibility of facilities management. Hence, it is necessary that IT works closely with other components of the enterprise to reach a detailed understanding of its consumption and costs.
Enterprise data centres are a leading opportunity to develop a ‘green’ infrastructure; however, the data centre should focus on all elements-hardware, cooling lighting, cabling, and equipment placement.

Other approaches to increasing IT energy efficiency extend beyond the data centre and involve innovative enterprise architecture. Understanding the IT infrastructure performance itself is an important means to achieve energy efficiency. Load distribution needs to be effectively managed. Turning off servers when they are not in use or during periods of low density traffic can deliver low costs.

When looking at an enterprise in entirety, it is extremely essential to go beyond the IT Infrastructure and understand how automation of processes can result in reduced power consumption. Hence, identifying specific software solutions for this need is important.