I’ve been hearing about green IT for a while now and personally thought it was a lot more hype than true business value creation.   I was surprised coming over to the IT side to see a good deal of focus being applied to Sustainability.  A couple months ago, I asked a peer of mine working on Intel IT sustainability a simple, yet challenging question.

“Why should an IT manager or CIO bombarded with a 1,000 other things to think/worry about, care about sustainability?  How will it help them advance their careers or bring more IT value to the business.”

The answers I got from her plus a recent listing from Gartner of “IT for Green” as Number 4 on a Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010, helped shape my thinking and the title for this blog.

• Keep the Business Running/Legal.  As an ongoing activity, IT must always look at industry and regulatory trends to proactively plan for an ever-changing compliance landscape.  Many European Union countries and the US Environmental Protection Agency are creating regulations that affect the application of information technology.
• Green IT initiatives can impact ROI and Profitability. In addition to the benefits of electricity savings, the proper application of technology (like proactive server refresh, facility re-use) can affect land use, avoidance of new construction, boost asset utilization … all of which assist in improving corporate sustainability.
• Green IT initiatives can also reduce operational costs. I recently learned about the broad video conferencing capabilities that Intel IT has enabled to help employees collaborate across time zones and countries.  This capability has encouraged less travel for routine purposes avoiding unnecessary travel expense for employees delivering a dramatic multi-million dollar savings impact this current year.

The three reasons listed above are prudent IT operational activities and doing them represent best IT practices that have a solid impact on creating business value. Not doing them could actually have detrimental impacts to an IT career. Intel IT’s recent data center strategy identified that not only is proactive server refresh the biggest driver of financial value but also in the reduction of IT’s CO2 footprint. Another area where our business strategy benefited IT Sustainability was in our transition from a desktop driven PC fleet to a mobile PC fleet that boosted employee productivity while employing more energy efficient solutions.

However, IT sustainability also help serve as an example for corporate responsibility building brand, influence product purchase with an increased focus on energy efficiency and influence the improvement of business processes with a mind toward efficiency and elimination of redundancy and waste. 

Gartner's Top 10 list reinforces these sentiments where they identify that "IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.”

So while IT Sustainability may not be your most important IT or CIO priority, investing with an eye toward this topic is wise and is likely aligned with many other priorities you and your peers are already doing. 

For us inside Intel IT, it is now clearer to me why Intel IT maintains an IT Sustainability Program that supports Intel’s Corporate Sustainability initiative.  

Intel IT’s proof of concept efforts in data center cooling innovation earned us recognition as one of the 2009 Green 15 by Infoworld.com.  Together with Intel’s business leaders, our operational and investment efforts have helped Intel achieve a top 5 ranking as a green company by Newsweek.

Learn more about Intel IT’s lessons learned and best practices here.

Chris (twitter)

At a recent event our CIO, Diane Bryant, talked about our continued plan to replace old servers in our Data Centers (http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44213/135/). Here is a summary of her key points:

• Not replaceing servers could have costed Intel $19 million due to high maintenance and cooling cost
• Our plan of refreshing old servers with Nehalem servers will save Intel $250 million over 8 years

If you are an IT manager looking at where you can find extra dollar in your IT budget to invest in new technology, new innovation and new competitive capability for your organization, this must be good news for you! Moreover, if you do nothing, you are opening a hole in your IT budget.

Here is a recent white paper and a video we published to discuss our server refresh strategy and how we are getting the cost benefit Diane Bryant shared:

Realizing Data Center Savings with an Accelerated Server Refresh Strategy

We have also developed a Server Refresh ROI estimator so you can calculater the amount of savings you can get from these cash machines:

http://www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator

If you ain't satisfied, here is a video showing you how to use the estimator!

Go and install those cash machines into your data centers now! 8-)

I have just returned from the Intel sponsored Eco-Technology Great Debates where I was slotted into the topic of Thin vs. Thick Client Energy Efficiency. I had the opportunity to weigh in on the side of "Thick" clients as the most energy efficient. The bad news is that our team lost; the good news is that we didn't lose by much (29 to 24)! The best news is that all of the teams had some very strong arguments (and even several very entertaining exchanges).

Being a simple data center guy, I learned a lot, especially as it relates to thin client architecture and energy impacts. No contest, thin clients consume less energy at the device level than do thick clients (PCs and Laptops). But is that really the energy efficient answer?

For thin clients, compute and storage are necessarily displaced to the data center. Data centers with thier concentrated IT equipment are typically inefficient to power and cool relative to laptops and PCs which are distributed by nature and cooled by ambient air. Generally data centers require 1 watt of power for cooling and electrical distribution (house load) for 1 watt of IT load (newer data centers are more efficient but still incur additional power costs simply to power and cool). Therefore, every kW of power that is shifted from distributed thick client use to a data center causes more or less 2 kW of impact in the data center! Wow!

With the majority of the world's data centers facing power or cooling capacity constraints and some with no additional grid power available at all, total energy costs extend beyond the simple house load + IT load equation. Expansion and upgrade of facilities increases energy consumption, as well. There are too many areas to detail here but needless to say the total power consumption for extracting and manufacturing data center components, transporting them to a site and construction of new facilities is non-trivial and likely larger per unit of compute than for the typical laptop. This collateral consumption is not comprehended in any calculations of alternative client model power efficiencies of which I am aware..

I also have no specific data on the power efficiency of PCs or laptops to provide rigorous comparison to data center power utilization efficiency. The above arguments, however, do appear to be logical. More work needs to be done to collect the data and analyze these concepts in detail.....

If you want to see the instant replay of all of the debates (including the client debate, liquid vs. air cooling and ac power vs dc power in the data center), click on the web link above and look for the embedded webcast URL at the bottom of the resulting page. There are also a couple of links to other articles on the subject that are well worth reading.

TTFN!