IL&FS Strives To Build Green Data Centres

IL&FS is constantly setting new benchmarks to show how IT can be leveraged for improving organisational efficiency and the national progress chart. The company is working towards fostering the use of green technology, has implemented RFID in its parking space, and is also evaluating innovative ways to use RFID for internal operations. The company’s IT team, in collaboration with consultants, is currently researching how licensing costs can be reduced. Anil Somaiya, group CTO, IL&FS, gives an insight to Biztech2.0 about the company’s innovation strategy and the road ahead. Read on for more on the initiatives.

Can you cite green IT initiatives underway in your organisation?

Every business phase comes with certain dose of challenges to be met and excelled. The current set of initiative amidst matured IT organisation is establishing ‘green IT’.
The growth and increasing dependency on computing resources is irreversible and to meet future business needs, IT organizations will have to manage computing, network, and storage demands keeping energy costs in control.

Fortunately today there is a better awareness and drive towards green IT, than what was there a few years ago. Incorporating green vision in IT planning will become business imperative and materialising this vision would need both short-term and long-term initiatives.

How has the experience been of your green technology initiatives?

A combination of short-term and long-term initiatives are required both at strategy and technology level. We have just begun this journey, initiatives such as server consolidation, virtualisation, reducing paper usage and moving towards electronic mode of form submission with digital signatures, driving consciousness for total cost of ownership, giving consideration to energy efficiency in each computing resource procured and drawing energy related metrics of our Data Centre and computing environment are few steps in this direction.

Can you give some insights to your initiative on data centre with green technology?

We are setting up data centres within our own group. The USP of the same is green and energy efficient, we are yet at a pilot stage. We have listed several areas which needs attention to illustrate a few:

Concentrating on physical layout, distribution of equal power across racks, by alternating hot aisle/cold aisle layout we can address cooling issues. We are working with consultants on the ways to optimise power usage and optimise cooling needs.

Our supply chain process would also evaluate suppliers with respect to energy efficiency and standards adopted. We are not procuring IT terminals without evaluating energy efficiency as one key parameter. We are bringing in the TCO concept from traditional CAPEX norms for placing an order.

We are also working towards introducing energy metrics within the data centre, for instance, we are building MIS on, power consumption for IT and Non-IT, Consumption norms per person, consumption per server/rack. We would also try and establish good performance benchmarks to compare where we stand. Such awareness is critical to drive a culture of energy efficiency.

Can you explain the Consolidation/Virtualisation initiative?

The virtualisation can also add to energy saving and also optimising licensing costs.The basic concept of virtualisation is to run on shared physical infrastructure in a manner that appears as a separate physical environment. For this one needs to bring storage and computing resources under an aggregate pool, from which networks, systems and applications can utilise then as per the business needs.

Our internal study has shown that not all applications demand the same level of IT resource and there are high peaks at different points in the daily business cycle. For instance for Capital market related applications the market pay-in/pay-out time sees surge in activities. Based on such careful analysis on utilisation and computing needs over a daily time scale we identified how to consolidate various business applications into fewer boxes. This in turn has double edge benefit one of course is cost and better management and other is saving of energy and more expensive licences which with the advent of multi-core technology have become another area of worry for IT organisations, which at times induces them to look for open source platform.

Are you undertaking any other innovative initiative in the IT space. Can you throw light on some of them?

Recently we introduced RFID technology to manage parking space within our premises. We are evaluated several options such as active tags, passive tag technique and worked closely with vendors in customising a solution that would help in making parking and security more efficient. Cars getting inside our compound do pass through access points which helps us validate them instantaneously. We also display and track the car model, colour and the registration number, to help security staff take a call on the validity.

There are no readymade solutions available for adoption of such innovative solutions all one needs is to identify the opportunity where a technology can be implemented to help meet the business need more efficiently.

Another such initiative is linked to the fact that we are the National Level Servie Agents (NLSA) assisting DIT (GOI) in setting up CSCs (Common Service Centres). This project of national importance is an important initiative under National e-Govenance Plan and it involves the setting up of over one hundred thousand CSCs across Indian villages. Each CSC will provide government and private services to the citizens at their footsteps. The states are gearing up to roll out the CSC in their geographies.

We are talking of over 100,000 CSCs and around 200,000-300,000 computing devices. Each CSC would be serving their set of customers and have Internet available. Such a wide scale of operation with hybrid environment speaks volume of challenges. We are working on building solutions for tracking uptime and availability of the CSC IT- terminals which includes defining the requirements, exceptional handling procedures, the IT environment constraints etc. and customising solution which can be rolled out on an all-India basis.

Can you provide more information on the CSC initiatives?

The Government of India has approved a Common Services Centres (CSCs) Scheme for providing support for establishing 100,000 Common Services Centers in 600,000 villages of India. Through CSC Government services would be accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets.

The objective is to develop a platform to provide a combination of IT-based as well as non-IT-based services in the remotest corners of the country. Example of basket of at CSC could be Computer education, Tele Medicine services, Communication, Education contents and several Government services such as Certificates, requests, grievance settlements etc.