Top 10 tips for green IT

Top 10 ways to cut energy use and green up your business technology.

The IT industry is currently responsible for around two per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the same as the aviation industry, but IT’s emissions are growing at a much faster rate. BT alone uses 0.7 per cent of the UK's electricity supply.

Reducing the environmental impact of an IT department is no easy task, and the effectiveness of many common strategies is dubious, to say the least. Carbon offsetting, for example, may appease customers and give the marketing department something to show off, but the real-world benefits are debatable. So, what can be done? Here are ten strategies that really work.

1. Teleconferencing

Teleconferencing has been around for decades, and videoconferencing has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Despite this, though, tens of thousands of people fly to meetings abroad every day.

The benefit of face-to-face conversation is undeniable, but modern, high-definition videoconferencing has brought remarkable clarity to what was once a flaky technology, and the price is falling rapidly.

For international companies, investment in multiple videoconferencing rooms – or just renting the rooms from could save hundreds of tons of carbon emissions every year, and pay for itself in travel savings within a year. Overall IT spending and energy consumption may rise, but the bigger picture reveals significant savings.

2. Ditch paper

The phrase "paperless office" is inextricably linked with 1970s ‘Tomorrow’s World’ episodes, but the idea has made little progress towards the mainstream. The undeniable fact is that people still work with print outs everyday, and printers are one of the biggest offenders as far as office energy users go.

Around 40 per cent of those currently in use need to be manually turned off, but regularly aren't. Paper is also an environmentally-draining product, requiring the felling of trees and the use of huge quantities of bleach. Sourcing recycled paper, making duplex printing the default, and investing in printers that automatically power down are easy first steps.

Better still, a PIN-based collection system encourages staff to only print what is necessary and keeps logs to highlight heavy-use areas.

3. E-documents and online tools

Another approach is to reduce the need for staff to print documents at all, by making online experiences better. Internal tools, if badly designed, will steer people towards paper alternatives, so design them better. For example, holiday request forms are printed out in their hundreds every year in most offices, only to be read by HR, entered into a database and disposed of. A one-off investment in a well-designed online tool – possibly built into the existing intranet – will eventually yield large savings, and the same can easily apply to customer facing services.

4. Consolidated data centers

Large companies usually have geographically distributed data centers, which can be inefficient because of the duplicated overheads involved. One data center will use less power than two running the same amount of hardware, as lighting and cooling costs will be lower – all areas the British Computer Society is investigating with the Carbon Trust.

Consolidation also makes maintenance and installation of new hardware easier, and cuts down on the need for support staff to travel, further reducing energy use. Of course, centralized hardware can be seen as placing all your eggs in one basket, but off-site backup firms can easily solve this problem.

5. Visualization

Visualization is booming in popularity, and it’s easy to see why, as it offers cost reductions in the server room and simplifies maintenance. One of the biggest advantages, though, is in energy savings. By reducing the number of servers needed, and making more efficient use of the ones that are left running, your company can cut down on energy bills and cooling. It’s estimated that for every pound spent on hardware from an IT budget, 50 pence is spent on cooling and energy costs, so this can easily add up.

Currently, the average server uses less than 55 per cent of its potential, and with dual core processors becoming the norm this is only going to get worse, as many applications are ill-equipped to take advantage of multiple cores. Visualization leader VMware claims that the average consolidation ratio is 10 to one – a single server can run the workload of ten standard servers as virtual machines. Virtual machines can even be moved from one server to another in real time, so even more servers can be shut off at night or during holidays when demand decreases.

6. Home working

Home working is an idea that has gained a lot of momentum since the wide-scale adoption of home broadband. With almost all office work now done on a PC, it's possible for staff to sign in and work seamlessly, no matter where they are.

This has several benefits. The demand for space and power in the office will go down, saving significantly in rent and utility charges.

But there’s an ulterior motive, too. BT admitted in a recent investigation of home-working that 60 per cent of the time employees saved by not having to travel, they ended up giving back by working extra hours. And Microsoft has recently found in a separate study that home working can save employees £500 a year.

Whatever the true motivation, in the next few years employers will further embrace the idea that work is an activity, not a building.

7. Server rooms

As the cost of running and cooling servers is so high, huge energy savings can be made by making the server room more efficient. The more time and money invested in this, the greater the savings, but small changes can be put into practice immediately.

For a start, most server rooms are brilliantly lit, all day, every day, for no reason. Installing motion-sensitive lighting can, over long periods of time, reduce a company’s energy use considerably.

Closing any leaks in air conditioning systems can also help, and companies can be brought in to monitor airflow and make suggestions on new layouts that will make greater use of the cooling power you already have, by identifying any hot spots.


8. Desktops and the grid

There’s a huge computing resource that almost all companies have, and few take full advantage of: user’s desktops. Most of the day, these machines are barely idling – checking email and writing documents barely taxes a modern processor, and there are times when they’re not used at all.

Some companies are starting to make use of all those spare cycles, such as Dresdner Kleinwort.

“The cost of supercomputers isn’t very economical and isn’t very scalable,” says David Doherty, one of the company’s developers. “Every single computer in every office location is hooked up to the bank’s network and has a small piece of software installed on it that allows it to communicate with the grid. This software does absolutely nothing until someone logs off their machine or the screensaver comes on while the employee goes out for a pub lunch. At this point, the grid sends it a bunch of files with an executable that is run on the machine.”

9. Turn it off

Assuming you’re not making use of desktop power during the night, those machines need to be switched off. Asking employees to turn off their desktops is one of the least effective ways of making this happen – people forget, or are too lazy to do it.

One way around this is to force it. Set all machines to power down unless active at a certain time in the evening, or by using automatic remote shutdown tools.

The Government itself is thinking of doing this – and expects to save £10 million a year in energy costs.

10. Think holistically

The final thing that companies should do to save power is think on a holistic level, and investigate unusual ways to save energy.

HP recently spent time redesigning a desktop case, which involved an initial outlay in research and design and retooling overheads. However, within a month, the more efficient design saved the equivalent of the Eiffel Tower in steel.

It's important that companies approach reducing the environmental impact of their operations on a wider scale - providing home desktops and broadband connections for employees may seem like an expensive overhead, but could yield huge savings in real estate rental and utility charges, not to mention reducing the carbon footprint of each employee by reducing their need to travel.