Green economics?

• Article 71 of 77
• Information Age, June 2005
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Save the world. Although sometimes it might seem like it, that job is not usually high on most CIOs’ priority list. What is usually pretty high up is “save money” and that, surprisingly, is where the two coincide, because it is now possible for organisations to deploy environmentally friendly technologies and practices that will either save money or boost IT’s budget.

“Green IT” has experienced fluctuating popularity in the UK. A poll in 1993, the heyday of green consciousness, by printer manufacturer Kyocera Mita found that while most organisations and indeed CIOs thought that being environmentally friendly was a laudable ambition, “most day-to-day support activities are carried out in the business world without paying any attention to the environmental consequences”. In other words, while being green was a nice idea, putting it into practice was another matter.

Even for right-thinking CIOs, it hasn’t been easy to find best practice advice on purchases and processes. Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and even the government’s own Carbon Trust Foundation are unable to supply guidelines on environmentally friendly IT policies when asked. Industry analysts are no better, with stalwarts such as Gartner and Forrester left pointing to isolated pieces of research at best.

Nevertheless, anyone who wants to develop a green IT policy can start with the basic principles that apply to all green-thinking: use as few resources as possible; and produce as little waste as possible. From these, the cost savings available from a green IT policy become more obvious: resources cost money to obtain, so using fewer saves money. Waste costs money to dispose of, so producing less saves money.

With any IT hardware purchase, there are a huge range of resources used. A PC, server or peripheral requires a large amount of raw materials to manufacture. A single PC, for example, requires five hundred pounds of fossil fuels, fifty pounds of chemicals, and more than a ton and a half of water to produce. It also requires electricity to run during its whole lifespan: at boot time, it may require 100W; when relatively idle but with the screen on, 50W; when in sleep mode, between 3W and 15W. Running flat out, 24/7, at roughly 5p/kWh, a PC could cost an organisation £43 per year in electricity costs. Similarly, a CRT monitor will typically draw 100W or more in power when switched on (compared with 30-60W for an LCD monitor; LCD monitors also have far fewer hazardous materials in them, making them easier to dispose of). There is also the additional cost of the extra air conditioning needed to keep the office cool if there are a large number of PCs.

From more standard IT perspectives, PCs also cost money to buy, manage, repair and store or dispose of when they reach the end of their lifecycle, which is now only two years, according to Gartner Research.

The ‘greenest’ option is to get rid of PCs altogether, but a far more practical choice is use thin client devices instead. These run most applications on a server, with the client just a window onto the server’s activities. As such, they usually don’t require powerful processors, hard drives, large amounts of memory, PCI cards or other standard PC components.

David Angwin, senior regional marketing manager at Wyse Technology, explains the advantages as he sees them. “From a green perspective, there are really three areas where thin clients excel. Because they have no moving parts, they have a very low power consumption. They produce less heat as a result, which means you can have many thin clients in a room without needing air conditioning. They also last longer.”

A typical thin client will only usually draw about 5.6W, even when used all day, at a cost of roughly £2 per year in electricity charges. Its usual lifespan is five years, instead of two years, with a mean time to failure of over 175,000 hours compared to 25,000 hours for PC. It is also usually cheaper than a PC, costing £140 or more. Since all the applications run on the server, a thin-client environment is also far easier to manage and provides a lower total cost of ownership than even the most well managed PC environment, according to Gartner.

Thin clients aren’t practical for all situations, particularly in organisations with many power users. By adopting certain policies, the cost of PCs to the environment – and the IT budget – can be reduced. Switching monitors and PCs off at night can save companies so much money in electricity costs, it could even be worth hiring people purely to go round the company each night doing just that. Buying higher-specced PCs initially will increase their lifetime and reduce the amount of waste the organisation produces. Enabling power management settings will save considerable power, and turning off screensavers will do likewise – a monitor displaying a screensaver will use potentially 25 times as much power as a monitor that’s in standby mode.

Shifting PC processing power to the server obviously requires either more servers or more powerful servers. As many data centre managers will attest, reducing power consumption is more than just a way to save money: it’s a way to make data centres viable.

“Power consumption in data centres is an important issue,” says Damian Reeves, co-founder and CTO of Zeus Technology. “The expense of running extra air-conditioning to keep computers within operating temperature, the extra backup generators needed to keep power, draining computers alive during electricity outages and the sheer space taken up by large hungry computers places a heavy burden on the financial model of operating a data centre.”

Importantly, the recent advent of blade servers and high-density racks has made it possible to vastly exceed the power supply built into existing data centres – with most racks usually served with 15kW of power rather than the 20-30kW now typically needed. These racks generate large quantity of heats that are difficult if not impossible to dissipate even with additional air conditioning equipment.

Again, reducing the amount of hardware required is the greenest route. Many servers often run at only 10-20% of capacity, compared to mainframes which often run at near to 100% of capacity. So using utility computing and virtualisation approaches (in which a single server can run more than one operating system and associated storage and applications) to consolidate several servers’ applications onto a single server can quickly reduce both the number of servers and the amount of power required. Indeed, an IBM zSeries mainframe can support 10,000 separate Linux images, so replacing 10,000 servers with a single mainframe is a potential solution – albeit one with few takers.

Cooling technologies, such as Fujitsu Primecenter LC water cooling system and IBM’s calibrated vectored cooling (CVC), that improve the efficiency of cooling can reduce the overall power consumption of the combined systems. According to Tim Dougherty, IBM eServer BladeCenter worldwide manager, CVC-equipped racks require “57% less electricity than 1U servers and up to 40% less electricity than HP’s two-way blade”. Garry Owen, head of enterprise at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, says that “the savings made in terms of extending equipment life anduptime, reduced system power consumption due to their running cooler, and higher equipment density due to cooler running, outweigh the additional power used to run the [Primecenter LC water-cooled] rack”.

One last emerging trend that both reduces power consumption and the number of components used in the system are data centres powered using DC current. All computers, whether PCs or servers, use DC current internally, but all require relatively inefficient, unreliable, heat-generating converters to take AC mains electricity and convert it to DC. With a supply of DC current, power converters are no longer necessary, saving power, reducing heat output and increasing power supply reliability by as much as 70 times. Currently re-emerging in the US after an aborted attempt by Compaq to kick-start the market several years ago, data centres that are wired for DC current can save 20% over the same system with an AC power supply while systems are in use; when they’re idle, the savings increase to as much as 50%.

Printing is one of the most wasteful operations environmentally an organisation can perform. As with PCs, switching printers off at night can save money – a printer in standby mode can use 11W of power. Ensuring that duplexing options are switched on where available can halve the amount of paper used. Using laser printers rather than inkjet printers can greatly reduce the number of (expensive) consumables required: over a five-year period, a printer will typically consume four or five times its original cost in consumables.

Xerox’s solid ink technology and Kyocera Mita’s separate drum technology offer more environmentally friendly – and cheaper - alternatives to standard laser toner cartridges. Paul Birkett, Xerox UK business solutions manager, says: “Due to the simplicity of the consumables, you don’t have to pull drum units out: you just drop in an ink block, which has the consistency of a wax crayon. It produces zero ozone and zero waste. Xerox is already beginning to exploit the technology and it will go right through the range over time.” Xerox claims that printers that use solid ink can print 30,000 pages before they need attention, compared with 1,212 pages with laser printers and that for every 100,000 pages printed, solid ink printers will generate 4.4 pounds of landfill waste, compared to 198.4 pounds for a typical colour laser printer.

Kyocera Mita’s separate drum system takes the drum usually contained in standard laser toner cartridges and makes it an integral part of the printer. “When the toner runs out on a conventional printer, you normally dispose of the drum as well,” says Tracey Rawling Church, head of marketing, Kyocera Mita. “With our devices, the only thing replaced is toner.” This means the cost per page in consumables is 0.3p with Kyocera Mita printers, says Rawling Church, compared to other laser printers which normally print at 1p per page or more. With no included drum, the amount of wastage is reduced as well.

Green IT savings last all the way through to the end of hardware’s lifecycle. The un-green option of disposing of a PC – throwing it in a landfill – can cost between £50 and £80, according to Gartner Research, with British landfills typically charging by weight of disposed material. However, a pilot programme by Maxitech.biz run over the past two years found that a typical organisation can recover 5% of the initial cost of redundant IT equipment, and one in three can generate a positive return from its recycling programme.

Technology integration and services company Morse goes even further than Maxitech and claims that its “asset retirement programme” can at the very least not cost money – which given the cost of storing obsolete equipment is one step up – and will usually produce in large organisations a revenue of £10,000 to £100,000 a year.

“It can be done a number of ways,” says Steve Mellings, a specialist in the decommissioning of IT equipment at Morse. “The traditional way is the trade-in where a customer would purchase new hardware, return the equipment to use and then to the vendor and they would receive an amount of money in return for that.”

Vendors, such as Dell, Sun, IBM and HP, are creating extensive buy-back programmes for their own equipment, offering between 4 and 20% of the list value of new equipment. This is partly to reduce the amount of second-hand hardware available within channels and to increase customer loyalty. But it is also a response to the EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive, due to come into force in the UK in August, which will require equipment manufacturers to assume responsibility for the disposal of hardware they manufacture. Since it also limits how much can be put into a landfill, many parts of computers will be recycled and manufacturers are already changing their hardware’s construction and raw materials to make them easier to recycle.

Mellings says that most organisations are unaware of WEEE and should discuss it with their suppliers when negotiating contracts: many, for instance, would not know that if a company sells the organisation a monitor, for example, it would have to take back one of its own old monitors as part of the deal.

The second option is a buy-back. “We would effectively buy back the equipment and then broker it on their behalf or dispose of it.” Mellings says there’s a significant market in Eastern Europe and Asia for Pentium III desktops, for example; the cost of shipping the PC is usually more than equalled by the sales cost, and at the very least is less of a cost than disposing of the PC in a landfill.

“Green IT” may seem less than mainstream at the moment, but most vendors and analysts agree that it will become more and more important over the next few years. EU legislation such as WEEE will provide considerable opportunities for revenue returns from old IT equipment. As organisations start to look more at ongoing costs of hardware as well as initial acquisition costs, the products that use the least power and the least consumables will quickly stand out as having the lowest TCO. And in the data centre, only those technologies that run the coolest will be economically viable as rack densities increase. Green IT’s time is coming – disguised as commonsense economics.

Case study: Lex Vehicle Leasing
Based in Slough, Lex Vehicle Leasing is a joint venture between the RAC and Halifax that provides contract hire for company car and van fleets. In 1996, the company decided it wanted to reduce the environmental impact of its business – and save money – by redesigning its business round the environmental ISO 14001 certification.

One of the company’s aims was to reduce the company’s carbon dioxide output by a third. Helen Counsell, quality environmental manager at Lex, says a number of IT policies were introduced to do this and achieve other green aims. “We replaced all of our CRT monitors with LCD monitors: they use less power and emit less radiation. We donated all our old PCs to charity for re-use elsewhere. We implemented faxing from PCs to reduce the amount of paper we used and implemented double-sided printing wherever possible. We monitored which departments used more paper, and found out how to manage the peaks and troughs of printing.” In its more remote offices, the company also chose to use thin clients running Citrix to connect them to the main business systems in Manchester.

On top of these more visible IT policies, the company has implemented remote working for employees, installing phone lines at their homes and giving them broadband connections. This saves many employees the difficulty of the morning commute altogether in some cases, or offsets it outside peak hours so the time spent in traffic jams and at lower speeds – and therefore greenhouse gas output - is reduced. Since few employees change any of their houses’ heating settings or print many documents at home, the overall effect is a benefit to the environment and improved staff morale from flexible working.

The biggest benefit IT has brought to the company’s bottom line through green policies has been video conferencing. Introduced at the end of 2003, video conferencing is used wherever possible between the company’s other sites in Manchester, Marlow and Stirling, with the Lex IT Centre in India, and with suppliers in the US.

Says Counsell, “We found it amazing the amount of savings in terms of money, time, carbon dioxide and even the stress levels of people on the road.” In 2004, Counsell says, the company saved £217,500 through video conferencing, reduced the organisation’s carbon dioxide output by 140 tonnes, saved 9,051 hours of employee time and 63,600 litres of fuel.

The links to overseas partners have also paid dividends. Bi-monthly visits to the Lex IT Centre by ten specialists and managers are now unnecessary, as are trips to the US. With research from the University of York now suggesting that the rise in demand for air travel is one of the most serious environmental threats facing the world, the benefits to Lex’s balance sheet of video conferencing are also benefits to the environment.

Carbon dioxide emissions by form of transport
Air: 270g/mile
Rail: 80g/mile
Car: 220g/mile

Useful resources
www.gooshing.co.uk: a green/ethical shopping guide for various IT products, including PCs, monitors, printers, firewalls, and servers.
www.distortionwave.com/Power.html: online calculator to determine how much power a typical PC requires
www.envirowise.gov.uk: offers UK businesses free, independent, confidential advice and support on practical ways to increase profits, minimise waste and reduce environmental impact.
www.it-environment.org: The UN’s IT and the environment initiative. Contains research and further information about environmentally friendly IT policies.

Facing facts

• A single, loaded rack of blade servers will easily consume 15kW of electricity. This generates over 51,000 BTUs (British Thermal Units) per hour, which is more than a typical household oven demands. It requires a cooling capacity sufficient to air-condition two homes. (Source: Globix)
• £1,000/employee or 1% of turnover: how much money an organisation can save through environmental best practice (Source: DTI)
• £50-80: cost to dispose of a typical PC in a landfill (Source: Gartner)
• 38.4kg: amount of waste produced by running a Ricoh AP600N printer for six months, 24/7. An HP LaserJet 4520 produces 20.2kg, while a Kyocera FS-3830N produces 4kg. (Source: Druckerchannel.de)
• 1,500 pieces of A4: Leaving a photocopier on overnight uses enough energy to print over 1,500 A4 copies (Source: Carbon Trust)
• £150: the cost in electricity over five years of running a single CRT monitor during the day and leaving it in standby mode during the night (Source: PC Pro Magazine)
• 12,000kWh: Any organisation that consumes more than 12,000kWh/annum has to pay VAT on its electricity consumption at 17.5%, rather than the reduced rate of 5%, as well as the “climate change levy” of 0.43p per kWh plus VAT, implemented in 2001.

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