Greening IT

This weekend after several draft releases our book, on how IT can be used to build a Low-Carbon Society, is officially published and can be downloaded.

The last months, during writing this chapter, a lot of things happened in the IT arena. Initiatives and discussions on the technical or ‘micro’ level took place such as getting unity in measuring energy usage, initiatives to place data centers at locations with alternative energy supply (geo-thermal, wind) to get a near zero carbon footprint data center, alternative designs such as containerized data center design or nano data centers. But also on the economical or ‘macro’ level their is some movement. Carbon legislation and the use of Carbon Cap and Trade mechanisms is now high on the agenda. Carbon legislation will definitively have a huge impact on our behavior and consumption of energy sources.

Writing and compiling a collaborative international book on the topic of Greening IT with such great editors like Adrian, Irene and John was very inspiring.

Hopefully this book with wonderful contributions of my fellow writers, on very different aspects of Greening IT, will inspire people to take action by making use of the great potential information technology has for making society greener.

Best regards Rien

P.S.

The chapter “Why Green IT is Hard” is my personal contribution to this book. To give you some idea, here is the abstract and a word cloud:

Why Green IT is Hard
- An Economic Perspective -

According to the common view, Green IT comes down to implementing technical measures. The idea is that, given better power management of equipment in the workspace (such as laptops and pc’s), more efficient power usage of servers, storage and network components, virtualization of servers, better power and cooling management in data centers, the problems can be solved. But is this really true? The reason IT is not green at this moment is at least as much due to perverse incentives. Green IT is about power and money, about raising barriers to trade, segmenting markets and differentiating products. Many of the problems can be explained more clearly and convincingly using the language of economics:  asymmetric information, moral hazard, switching and transaction costs and innovation. Green IT is not a technical problem but an economical problem to be solved.

We are happy to announce that we have sent the book to the printers! This represents a major milestone for us and it means we are getting very close to moving into the next and very important phase of promoting the book. The book will now go through one or more proof prints before we announce a full and final release. Taking a retrospective look at the process, I wish we could have sent more resources on promoting the book before now,

but being a small non-profit creative commons based project, resources are limited. The good news however, is that a number of our contributors are actively finding opportunities to promote the book in both traditional and creative ways. Additionally, we have found some people who like what we’re doing, agree with our message and have
volunteered to help promote the book. One such person is Tripta Prashar, Director of independent Green IT Consultancy firm Giving Time and Solutions Ltd in the UK.

We will be preparing a press kit and presentation kit too. If you believe you could help promote the book and more importantly our message of the power of IT in enabling the transformation of our societies into ones characterised by low-carbon emissions, then please either contact us or feel free to use the kits which we will release. We appreciate all promotion – from as small as a tweet, to creating imprints of the book
with co-branding. As long as our uncompromised message gets out there we are happy!

Finally we would like to congratulate Sean Whetstone (who wrote the Thin Client chapter in the book) for winning the Environmental Project of the Year at the Green IT Awards.

We’re very proud to announce that European Commissioner for Climate Action, Ms. Connie Hedegaard, has agreed to write the foreword for our collaborative, international, non-profit making, Creative Commons licensed book.

Connie Hedegaard is well-known in green societies all over the world, for her work leading up to the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen 2010, where as the Danish Minister of Climate Change and Energy, she took over the chairmanship of the UNFCCC.

The fact that such a high-level representative supports our common efforts on Greening IT is extremely positive – and we hope that it will further promote our messages across the world.

The book will be published online and in print by the beginning of June 2010.

We are often asked, “What’s this book Greening IT about?”. Thinking about the old saying a picture can say more than a thousand words we fed the word cloud engine http://www.wordle.net/ with the text of the latest version of the book.

And here it is, a nice word cloud which we want to share with you.

Is there any other news? Yes, new contributors have arrived and for the next iteration some new chapters will be added and the size of the book will grown quite substantially.

We are progressing nicely and are nearing the end of contributors contributing to the book. The next phase of the book’s evolution is about to start and a flurry of proof reading, editing, re-arranging, typesetting, and reviewing is about to begin.

As was mentioned in an earlier post, we designed and printed some cards to hand out to people during COP15 in Copenhagen. The purpose is to both promote the book and hand-out to potential contributors. I’m happy to say after leaving the UK 7 days ago they finally got to our door (thanks for the “quick” delivery Post Danmark :)).

The cards are Moo mini cards and they really are gorgeous.

We have now moved into Facebook to increase awareness on Greening IT and to spread information on our Greening IT project. Facebook should reach out to help spread knowledge among family, friends and the general public. Please support us by joining the fan club, it’s called Greening IT.

We are still looking for high quality contributors. So, if you are an opinion leader or expert in a Green IT field, and would like to contribute, please don’t hesitate to contact us at editors@greening.it

I will be attending the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen from 7th to 18th December. This year the Secretariat for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UN itself, will have an exhibition that will focus on how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are helping to increase awareness and support concrete action on climate change in both developing and developed countries.

The exhibition will show practical examples of existing and upcoming technologies and practices and show related products and services that illustrate ICT’s usefulness in combatting climate change. It will also showcase current ICT-related projects.

It sounds exciting, right. I’ll be sure to be there, and give out my cards – and tell everyone what we’re doing. If you see this and want to meet me there, just email irene@greening.it and we can make an appointment.

You can also still catch us on Twitter: Isobotta, Asobotta, Gotze, TomRaftery, geekygreen, GreenITers and so on.

I’m happy to say that we are on track for publishing a draft book online by early December in time for the start of COP15. The book will be a rough draft – new chapters will be added after this date, and existing ones improved, but thanks to all the hard work of the contributors and editors we’re excited about what will be released.

So stay tuned for the imminent online publication of Greening IT!

As the year is approaching its tail end, various research firms are making their predictions for 2010. Most notably for the IT industry last week was Gartner’s release of its forecast for the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010. This list was released during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando by analysts David Cearly and Carl Claunch to the interested attendees lucky enough to be there. The accompanying press release states that a strategic technology is “one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.”

While forecasts such as these may not be the most scientific in their compilation, they do give a glimpse into the minds of the analysts who have their finger on the pulse of the IT industry. So they are of some interest, but of course must be also be taken with a punch of salt.

Of interest to this blog and the book which we are compiling is that six of the ten technologies are ones which we consider as either partially or fully green initiatives. Those are:

• Cloud Computing
• Advanced Analystics (while it might be a stretch, this could be used in Smart Grid projects).
• Client Computing
• IT for Green (aka IT which enabled Green initiatives)
• Reshaping the Data Center
• Virtualisation (predominatly for live migration and availability)

The image below shows how the list differs from 2009.

It’s interesting to see that Gartner have identified the difference between Green IT and ‘IT for Green’. This is great news for our book since IT enabling a greener society by way of a smaller carbon footprint is a central theme! Indeed even our domain name can be read as either Greening.IT (‘IT’ as in Information Technology), or Greening.it (‘it’ as in society).

Frost & Sullivan also published their forecast for 2010, but with an investment focus. In a presentation titled Global Top 10 Hot Technologies to Invest by the Director CEE Beatrice Shepherd, Green IT was identified as being high up on the list. The reason being that initiatives targeted at improving the energy efficiency of data centres have gained a lot of momentum in the past few years. He went on to say that “we rank high Green IT technologies as one of the top 10 taking into consideration that 18 percent of total energy in the world is consumed by IT. Nowadays, with everybody looking to reduce operating costs, we anticipate a lot of developments in this technology in the short term.

If you have any thoughts on the blog post, please leave a comment. If you would like more information on the book we are compiling and would possibly like to contribute, please contact us.

One topic which will be given some prominence in certain chapters of our book is that of energy hungry IT hardware. Just like the Cookie Monster, typical servers today have an insatiable appetite. Instead of craving cookies however, servers crave electricity. Two obvious direct by-products of their electricity consumption is both CO2 and heat.

The degree to which this craving changes as the hardware workload changes is referred to as its ‘energy elasticity’. For example, a server which has a high degree of energy elasticity is one characterised by consuming significantly less power when it’s idle compared to when it’s running at its maximum processing potential. Conversely, a server which has a low degree of energy elasticity consumes almost the same amount of electricity whether it’s in use or idle. Over the years the energy elasticity of commercial servers, desktops and laptops alike has steadily improved as hardware manufacturers have become more environmentally conscience (driven by market forces of course). The result is that the speed of adoption of energy elasticity improving technology has hastened, but there is evidence that significantly more can be done. Google for example uses servers which are “commodity-class x86 PCs running customised versions of Linux” which according to a paper published in the MIT Technical Review entitled “Energy-Aware Internet Routing” consume an impressive 65 percent of their normal power when idle. These servers clearly possess a high degree of energy elasticity. Google has also been able to significantly reduce the amount of heat emitted by their customised servers. These points alone suggest that it is possible to make commodity-class servers far more energy elastic with only simple, intelligent modifications.

Just like Google’s customised servers, there are numerous other interesting hardware and software solutions to the energy elasticity problem. However, there does seem to be a preference by these same solution providers for focusing on efficiency rather than elasticity. My take on this is due to the fact that historically the focus has been on squeezing the most performance out of the hardware and not its environmental footprint. There has been no reason for solution providers to service a market that jut doesn’t exist.

One example on the software side of the efficiency argument is a new linux distribution that gained some well deserved media attention this week called Lubuntu linux distribution This distribution is a derivative of Ubuntu with a light weight desktop called LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) and aimed at running on lower spec’ed machines. These machines typically use much less power (and in turn are responsible for lower CO2 emissions) than their more power counterparts. Running an operating system like Lubuntu on a fit-PC2 would consume a mere 5 watts of electricity per hour.

So is it better to look at efficiency or elasticity? I would say they are two very important components of the greener machine solution. Putting numbers to how large the elasticity component would however be very difficult to calculate accurately, and is only made more difficult by the fact that quality data on even the number and type of servers world wide is sparse. This very point is made by Jonathan G. Koomey, Ph.D. (a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a consulting professor at Stanford University, who studies information technology energy use and environmental impact) who points out that high quality research in this area is hard to come by due to the proprietary and secretive nature of enterprises. This is absolutely understandable – IT is still today a strategic asset (well, Nicholas Carr might disagree).

According to IDC, a server (clearly a very general reference) operating at 10% utilisation still consumes the same power and cooling as a server operating at 75% utilisation. They claim that in the current state of the market, for every $1.00 spent on new servers, the average enterprise spends $0.50 on power and cooling. Therefore energy elasticity is clearly a large and substantial part of the green server solution.

Ignoring the actual numbers though, consider three scenarios:

1. Enterprise X has a large server farm which is 60% utilised during a typical business day and during weekends and evenings is 5% utilised. This enterprise keeps all its servers running all the time to minimise operational/maintenance costs and to ensure power is available whenever its needed – day or night.
2. Enterprise Y also has a large server farm with similar demand patterns. However, in an attempt to introduce energy elasticity into the enterprise further than what’s build into the hardware, Enterprise Y runs on a virtualised environment. As demand varies virtual machines are consolidated, and unused servers are turned on/off (automatically) as demand dictates.
3. Enterprise Z has no processing capabilities itself, but instead leverages a cloud computing provider like GoGrid or Amazon. Their entire architecture is based around spawning and destroying instances of virtual servers in the cloud as demand fluctuates.

The energy elasticity of Enterprise X’s IT infrastructure is limited to what the hardware and software itself can provide. Enterprise Y in comparison has the opportunity to dramatically reduce its power usage thanks to virtualisation. However there is inevitably a constant (albeit far smaller than Enterprise X’s) power footprint. Finally Enterprise Z has an ultimately elastic architecture but without knowing how the cloud computing provider’s underlying infrastructure has been implemented it may or may not be the best. The energy elasticity enjoyed by Enterprise Y and Enterprise Z will in all likelihood result in cost and CO2 savings that surpass even the most elastic individual servers that Enterprise X may employ. In todays world of distributed computing I would suggest that the biggest gains in energy elasticity are not the concern of hardware vendors but are instead the concern of application and operational architects. These architects are positioned correctly to build systems that have energy elasticity built into them while at the same time providing the customer with solutions to their business needs.

If you have an opinion on this topic or have any material that might be of interest to the book we are writing on Green IT please leave a comment to this post.

On the verge of multiple crises

The current financial crisis has come at a time when the fossil fuel-based energy supply is dwindling – thus slowly pushing up energy prices. The current political environment is stimulating debate, fuelling the realisation of the need for change. Centuries of fossil fuel-based energy consumption has led to increased environmental pollution – not least it has lead to climate change and global warming, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases (CO2 etc.) in the atmosphere.

The environmental crisis is perhaps the most long-term crisis, if we do not act now to mitigate it. Climate change threatens to completely change our planet, our societies and our economies. We need decisive action in the short-term, in order to avoid severe consequences – in order to avoid the real crisis of climate change.

At this point however, we need to handle other crises at the same time. We need to boost the economies, produce more energy and protect the environment/climate. Can we really do all this at the same time?

I believe it is possible and I believe that green growth and the Low-Carbon Society, is what we should aim for. Those countries that will benefit the most from this new era are those capable of creating wealth in an environmentally conscious manner. And the process of greening IT, is the first step in that direction – along with a more sustainable energy production and consumption, based on renewable energy technologies.

Green Growth

Throughout the past centuries our societies have evolved immensely – and human kind and society have moved fast and come far. Yet, society as we know it today is based on unsustainable consumption patterns, and as we are starting to realise the effects – we need to find new solutions.

We need to rethink society – and create a new consumption infrastructure, based on resource efficiency and sustainability – and green growth. Many developing countries are just starting to see the light today, and we cannot take away their right to develop their societies and reach higher living standards. We need to work together to enable these countries to develop without being dependent on fossil fuels. We are not talking about stopping growth – instead we should just make it green.

Greener IT

When it comes to the environmental crisis, IT is part of the problem, but more importantly it is part of the solution. The IT sector is part of the problem due to its massive consumption of energy in the form of electric power. The sector creates a huge demand for stable and cheap energy, which unfortunately feeds the unsustainable worldwide dependence on fossil fuels.

On a global level IT is responsible for 2 % of emission of greenhouse gases. However, the remaining 98% is seen as opportunity for IT to help solve the problem. IT can provide the technological fix we need to reduce a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions from other sectors of society.

The more IT we apply, the more electric power we need. Therefore, in order for IT to green society, we need to develop new clean power solutions based on renewable energy technologies. This makes clean development in the energy sector essential to support the wider implementation and dissemination of green IT solutions.

The role of the energy sector

I’m very interested in looking more into the energy sector, as I think it is vital to support green growth, cleaner development, creating new consumption patterns etc. I will be getting back soon with my ideas on this – in the mean time I’d be very interested to hear your ideas on the role of the energy sector.