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September 25, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 24
Page(s) 40 in print issue
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Tracking Green IT
So You’ve Gone Green. Now What?
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| Key Points
• Green initiatives have to align with business goals, or they’ll be discontinued or actively harm the business.
• Replacing older equipment for more energy-efficient equipment is sometimes, but not always, a good idea.
• Start with a baseline and clear goals so that you know not only where you started, but where you’re going and how close you are to getting there. | It’s a cliché, but we’re all stuck with it: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And although some companies are settling for simply starting green initiatives and hoping for the best, the really business-minded ones are tracking the progress of those initiatives to measure their effectiveness.
If it sounds superfluous, consider the green strategy of replacing older equipment with new, more energy-efficient equipment. Data centers have bought new, more energy-efficient servers or routers assuming that they’ve just saved some money and a bit of the environment. But if they’ve made a capital expenditure that outstrips the money saved on electricity during its lifetime, they’re right where they started. Not only that, they may have also done more harm than good from a resource standpoint.
“Eighty percent of the power that a device uses is actually consumed during its manufacture,” explains Bob Houghton, president and CEO of Redemtech, an IT and asset disposition company (www.redemtech.com). “Energy-efficient computing devices are great, but if you retire a perfectly good piece of equipment prematurely, your net consumption of power will actually go up.”
 Get A Baseline
Companies differ in their approaches to becoming more green. Some target ghost servers—those servers that are being used minimally or not at all yet are still plugged in and drawing power. Others pursue virtualization to get more capacity out of fewer physical servers. Still others experiment with higher data center temperatures that maintain equipment life yet consume less cooling. Whatever your company’s green IT initiatives, measuring the progress of those initiatives and demonstrating their worth is vastly easier when you start with a baseline.
“Once you have a baseline, then you can set rational business goals for sustainability, and you can put measurements in place to manage progress toward those goals,” Houghton says. “It’s really no different from the way companies measure other goals: Where are you, where do you want to go, and what metrics will show how you’re doing?”
That baseline can function as a road map to know what to tackle first. “Any green initiative comes down to fundamentals: Am I getting the most processing or computational efficiency from what I’m using to do the task?” says Barry Thompson, CEO of Tervela, a messaging infrastructure company in New York and Boston (www.tervela.com).
“So what you’re doing and what you’re using to do it forms the metric. For example, if you know your rate of transactions per second per watt of electricity, or of network packets per second per watt, you can radically reduce your utilization and identify areas where you’re woefully inefficient.”
Monitoring Consumption
Pete Beckman, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (www.anl.gov), says that by using temperature and power monitors on its platforms, Argonne has done studies showing which computing jobs require more power. It found there are certain supercomputer applications that use their operations extensively and have considerably more power draw. “We now schedule some of these jobs, which run the chips hotter, in the evening when we can get cheaper power and the ambient temperature is lower,” Beckman says.
The Argonne experiment shows that by using data from utility bills, facility management systems, and other sources, you can calculate how much of each resource you’re using and where it’s going. For example, Joe Perillo works with facility management at MetLife to get granular data on the workings of MetLife’s two data centers. The primary data center is in Rensselaer, N.Y., while the backup is in Scranton, Pa.; both are about 60,000 square feet.
There are power monitoring systems installed at both data centers that monitor overall usage, and an electrician-read daily UPS output at additional points, which supplements the power monitoring system. Together these systems enable MetLife’s Corporate Real Estate department to provide Perillo with data on demand and usage, along with a monthly cost analysis. These reports are broken down between facilities infrastructure (such as HVAC), IT infrastructure (servers and other equipment), and administration areas. Based on these reports, Perillo’s group and Corporate Real Estate can measure the effectiveness of virtualization, HVAC changes and upgrades, layout design, and other factors.
MetLife had set a goal to decrease its carbon emissions by 20% by next year. It has already exceeded that goal. “Basically, we’ve not only succeeded in getting more capacity—nearly three times as much—with the same footprint, we’ve been able to bring our usage down with virtualization,” Perillo says.
Replacing Equipment
If your big green initiative is to replace older equipment with gear that takes less electricity to run and cool, then your baseline will have to include the equipment you have. “IT can’t be sustainable, because the hardware is not made from renewable resources,” Houghton says. “We promote the virtues of lengthening life cycles judiciously.”
That means reusing equipment in another area when it’s no longer useful in its current area. Make sure your asset repository is up-to-date and accurate so surplus inventory can be identified and repurposed or disposed of.
“At a large bank we serve, we worked to develop a strategic equipment matrix that identified equipment that was still qualified for use in the enterprise, the company’s inventory threshold, and a service path so they know what they want us to do with each piece of equipment, whether that’s refurbishing, testing and reimaging, or disposal,” Houghton says. That way, the bank not only knows what it has, it also knows how old each piece of equipment is, how much longer it can be useful, and when it should be reused or let go. Houghton says the company deferred more than $7 million in procurement by reusing product, and the investment yielded a 14.5:1 return.
Tervela’s Thompson suggests taking many variables into account when considering how much longer to use a piece of equipment, including the price of electricity, the gear’s need for HVAC, and the capital expense of replacing the equipment. “If you’re looking at a significant decrease—maybe 50%—in one of those sunk costs, replacement is worth considering,” he says. “If it’s less than that, it makes more sense to follow a normal equipment refresh cycle.”
Measuring the success of green initiatives also helps by keeping green initiatives from conflicting with business goals. Thompson gives the example of a hypothetical company with an algorithmic trading operation on Wall Street. “You could put all your computers in power management mode so that they consume less electricity,” he says. “But then your latency would increase and your company would lose money on trades. Green initiatives have to be meaningful, and they also have to allow you to meet or exceed the service-level agreement. Nothing can be monitored in isolation.” 
by Holly Dolezalek
To PUE Or Not To PUE?
The PUE (power usage effectiveness) rating is one metric for assessing a data center’s greenness. It’s expressed as a ratio, and it divides the amount of power that comes into a data center by the power used to run computer infrastructure. The measure comes from the Green Grid, a consortium of IT companies and individuals that seeks to improve energy efficiency in data centers.
But remember not to stop with determining the PUE. “What [the PUE] does is measure how well you’re balancing your facility’s supply to its IT demand,” says Steve Yellen, vice president of marketing for Aperture (www.aperture.com), a division of Emerson Network Power. “If you have a facility running at a certain PUE and then virtualize some of your IT load, that’s a good thing. But it may actually reflect negatively in your PUE, because now the facility supply may be overloaded for the IT demand.”
Yellen suggests that measures of how much IT work is completed per watt of electricity consumed may be a better way to determine how well a particular green initiative is working. But he also warns that the way to calculate that is not yet clear, and he suggests that for some companies, it might be better to just pick a metric that fits the business and wait for more clear guidance from the EPA or Green Grid. “As long as you know what your measurement is, you can still track your improvement over time,” he says.
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