In my last blog, I briefly talked how small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) can contribute to the ‘Green IT' initiative that is gaining moment in the global market place. I had a couple questions sent to me to break down two topics: One, how is IT power being consumed by end users and secondly what type of impact can SMBs have as it relates to ‘Green IT'.

Think about how power is used in a business environment, yes there are the basic energy costs of lights in the building and the electricity for your heating and cooling system however there are also power needs for other workspaces in your building. If you walked into you company's breakroom/kitchen, you would probably be able to identify at least 3 items that use power (refrigerator, coffee pot, microwave, etc...).

Now think about your employees' work area. At someone's desk they can have several items that require power: a clock, a fan, a cell phone charger, maybe a singing Dilbert and likely a PC as well. When we think of that PC, there is a lot to consider. There are several studies publicly available that show how much power is being used by SMBs, and how important of an issue it is for their business. According to a 2007 Gallup survey (http://www.gallup.com/poll/tag/Americas.aspx), over 54% of small businesses rate rising energy costs as one of their top business concerns and 43% have already implemented energy saving strategies to control costs.

One of the top power consumption issues, one I have talked to many SMBs about, is the common practice of employees leaving their computers on 24 hours a day. US electricity costs of leaving PCs on (while unattended) reaches $1.7 billion a year. This equates to a lot of money taken directly away from the bottom line. Rakesh Kumar from Gartner states it in future looking terms for large business by saying, "By 2010, about half of the Forbes Global 2000 companies will spend more on energy than on hardware such as servers. Energy costs, now about 10% of the average IT budget, could rise to 50% in a matter of years." This type of energy cost for large businesses will have a similar effect on small businesses.

PC energy consumption has traditionally been a "hidden cost" receiving relatively little attention. Typically when we think power consumption, the large enterprise data centers with their rows and servers come to mind. But the reality is PC power consumption matters as well. Data presented by Gartner demonstrates that on a global basis, compared to servers, PC's actually generate more CO2 emissions as compared with Servers, including cooling. Gartner broke down power consumption in the IT space as follows:

• PCs & monitors (39%)

• Servers and storage (23%)

• Fixed-line telecommunications (15%)

• Mobile telecommunication (9%)

• LAN & office telecommunications (7%)

• Printers (6%)

Source Gartner Inc. "Tera-Architectures A Convergence of New Technologies" by Martin Reynolds July 26, 2007

Moreover, according to an EPA study (http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revisions/downloads/computer/ComputerPowerMnmt.pdf) , up to 90% of PCs have power management disabled, so PCs left running often may remain at idle rather than going to lower power sleep state. Leaving an energy efficient PC running when not in use (night/weekends) is analogous to leaving a car running when it's not being driven.

Not surprising, the main areas that require focus are PCs and monitors. Servers have received a lot of attention because they are an obvious concentration of power consumption. They are power inefficient and offer the opportunity to remove significant amounts of visible costs (and usually, but somewhat more incidentally, CO2). However, the real area where the greatest overall effect can be made is at the desktop and with client devices. This is a harder challenge because of the behavioural issues (leaving systems on the entire day) that are involved in "fixing" the problem.

One approach that many small businesses could do to help conserve energy consumption is to focus on what you can do during non-business hours. For example, if you have PCs (Desktops or Mobile) and monitors that are not turned off on Friday night and run the entire weekend - well, there are 2+ days of wasted power with no business benefit. If you look at a small business environment where there are more than several desktops, notebooks, and servers () (as you've just said that servers shouldn't be the only focus wrt power consumption...), the energy saved by having all machines shut off for the weekend can make a real difference in energy costs. In addition, make sure you purchase Energy Star ^TM (a system-level specification including components such as processor, chipset, power supply, HDD, graphics controller and memory monitors and computers) products. These products are made up of energy efficient components that will help save power when in use.

So how can SMBs start becoming more Green? Start looking at where you are using energy throughout your company workspaces. If you are not using a piece of equipment on the weekends whether it is a microwave or a monitor make sure the power is turned off to it. I recommend you start by looking look at which PCs and servers are still on when you are leaving the office this Friday. This will give you a good idea of the initial impact your company could provide by reducing your power consumption. In addition, if you are already using a manage service provider (MSP) to manage your network, ask them if they have a power savings plan that you could implement.

I would be very interested to hear what other ‘Green IT' ideas are out there. As mentioned previously ‘Green IT' does not just effect large enterprises. Energy consumption is something that not only impacts the status of our current physical environment but it also directly affects the financial bottom line for today's small and medium sized businesses.

I'm out in Portland at the local Intel Premier IT Professionals. Dave Buchholz is presenting out on Client virtualization, in which he odes a great job of explaining what Intel IT is doing, what does it mean for the IT environment.

Session Data: 09:00 AM Client Virtualization and PC Best Practices

Presented by: Dave Buchholz, Intel IT Technology Evangelist, Emerging Technology Team

Dave discussed the trend of technology/tools that are shifting from home use to business: Instant Messaging, Social media (wiki's, etc..).

Next up is for the networking and demo's.. If you are onsite in Portland come by the booth and talk to me about our IT community (Open Port) and we can even talk about Intel vPro technology if this is of interest.

More to come after the networking event..

The energy spent spinning up a flywheel, recharging a battery or pumping water up a reservoir can be recovered at a later time with with the appropriate infrastructure, minus a percentage loss lost to heating. This behavior is governed by the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Alas, there is no such luck in the operation of a data center. There is energy stored in the UPS batteries and the capacitors in the equipment, but this amount is minuscule compared to the total amount of electric energy fed into the data center. Hence, it is fair to say that all the electricity fed into a data center eventually gets converted into heat, warming up the air, ground or water around the facility. Again there is no way around the First Law of Thermodynamics.

In any case, the useful output for a data center is not the amount of energy that eventually gets to the UPS batteries or recharges capacitors in servers. It's the amount of computation done at the data center. However, counting CPU instructions is difficult and controversial. Hence it is common practice to settle for the next best metric as a proxy for computation, namely, the power consumed by the CPUs in all servers.

Measured as percentage of total data center power consumed, the CPU power consumption is rather small. Ainsworth, Echenique et al. from IBM (Figure 1-1, page 3) report that only 35 percent of the data center power goes to the IT equipment load. Likewise, power consumed by processors represent 30 percent of the IT equipment load. The number needs to be further derated to the CPU utilization, 20% on the average. If we do the math, the power dedicated to computation is about 2 percent of the total data center power.

John Pflueger from Dell (figure 1, page 9) reports a remarkably similar result. He estimates that 41 percent of the data center power is consumed by IT equipment, broken down into compute servers, storage and communication devices and other IT equipment. The compute server portion is 63 percent, and out of that 31 percent is consumed by the CPUs. If we apply the same 20 percent CPU utilization ratio from IBM, the end result is 1.6 percent, still within the ballpark.

Where does this analysis leave us in terms of actions we can take as part of a first order strategy? The data above is hierarchical, and hence a pyramid is a useful way to organize it:

Changes toward the top, namely in the CPU application workload will have a minuscule impact power consumption for the data center as a whole, yet they can have a dramatic impact in the data center efficiency, that is in the amount of useful computations done as defined above. These changes can take place in two ways.

First, due Moore's Law, a server refresh can potentially double the per output CPU if the servers are two years old, or more than quadruple it if the servers are four years old.

Second, a consolidation or virtualization exercise can address the low utilization numbers for CPUs from less than 20 percent to 60 to 80 percent. Higher numbers are possible, but it is desirable to reserve some headroom to make the servers more responsive to workload peaks. These benefits are attained through the deployment of software technology from VMware, Xen, or, more recently, Microsoft Hyper-V technology that comes with the newly released Microsoft Windows Server 2008, formerly code named Longhorn. A Microsoft white paper, Windows Server 2008 Power Savings reports up to 10X linear power savings in a study with Hyper-V. Results may vary. A basic assumption is that utilization factors are low to start with. Workloads that take multiple servers or workloads that need a server cluster to run, such as large database applications or mail servers might not see such large benefit if the utilization factor is initially high. However, that also means that that the CPU utilization efficiency was high to start with, so there is less room for improvement.

Near the bottom of the pyramid we are talking real megawatts. In many cases the low hanging fruit comes not from from pulling all the stops with technology, but from plain energy conservation. A homeowner intent on lowering electricity bills should not rush to install solar cells. The first step is to conduct an energy audit to identify areas of greatest impact. A data center is no different. In an engagement I was involved with, a team was investigating whether 300 servers could be landed in an aging 25,000 square foot data center without hot spots developing. The energy audit using thermal modeling tools indicated that the data center could actually support a whooping 1,800 additional servers with very minor changes, essentially plugging air leaks in the floor tiles and repositioning a few rows to define hot and cold aisles. Of course, these results must be taken with caution, becase supporting the extra servers would probably have required a power feed upgrade.

So far we have analyzed possible actions that can be taken at the top an at the bottom of the pyramid. What happens in the middle? This is a more complex question and requires the inclusion of process factors. Furthermore, a specific answer always requires a context. Below is a case study presented by Gregg Wyant and James Chen at the recent Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Gregg is the Intel IT CTO, Chief Architect and General Manager; James Chen is the Director for Engineering Computing. In this case study, a server refresh was conducted over 4-year old servers. The application requirements did not change, yet running the application in the newer servers allowed reducing the number of machines from 126 to 17. The potential payoff from Moore's Law is a bit over 4X, yet the actual power draw reduction was 8X. The rest comes from application optimization and IT process improvement, a tribute to the Intel IT engineers carrying the application migration.

The reduction from six cabinets to one actually understates the gain. If the cabinet is populated with 1U servers, it will be only half full. The energy density per cabinet however will have gone up. These cabinets need to be housed in a data center designed to handle higher power densities.

One of the best online resources for information on Intel's upcoming technology is the IDF (Intel Developer Forum) website, which can be accessed via Intel.com. Here's the link to a page where you can find webcasts of all the keynotes and some of the key technology forums:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/idffall_2008/video.htm?iid=idf_home+day1key

In particular you should check out the Technology Insights webcast by Rajesh Kumar on Intel's next generation micro-architecture, code named "Nehalem". This is an excellent, easy to follow description of the key advances made in the areas of performance and energy efficiency, as well as the balance between the two. The topics covered include:

• Increasing memory bandwidth (>3X) and reducing memory latency (40% improvement)

• Simultaneous Multithreading to get 20-30% performance increase with a 5% power increase

• A modular architecture to fit many markets and workloads

• Integrated power gates that drastically reduce switching and leakage power

• Low power and low voltage technology

You'll also find webcasts from the top execs in the company including Pat Gelsinger, CIO Justin Rattner and Renee James, the head of the Software and Solutions Group.

It's like getting a free trip to IDF, except you don't get to voucher for your meals