Green IT/Green computing/Green ICT

Green IT refers to,

> Environmentally sustainable computing of IT.
> It is "the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems—efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment.

Why go green?

With increasing recognition that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributing factor to global warming, enterprises, governments, and society at large now have an important new agenda: tackling environmental issues and adopting environmentally sound practices.

Greening our IT products, applications, services, and practices is an economic and an environmental imperative, as well as our social responsibility.

Reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximize energy efficiency during the product's lifetime, and promote recyclability or biodegradability of defunct products and factory waste.

Rising energy prices, together with government-imposed levies on carbon production, are increasingly impacting on the cost of doing business, making many current business practices economically unsustainable.

- To enhance the brand and to improve corporate image.

The problem

- Energy crunch and high cost in producing it.
- Most of the traditional means of generating energy are environmentally non friendly.
- Development and improvements in technology including hardware and software have largely been achieved without regard to energy consumption.
- Means of disposal of computers, servers, and associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems impacting the environment a lot.
- Not many are thinking on reusability of systems or subsystems.
- The threat of recession tightening not only our budgets, but also our customers' budgets;
- Increased pressure around ROI - again within our brand and among our customers.
- A widening set of geographies to reach and manage.

Roads to Green Computing

Green use — reducing the energy consumption of computers and other information systems as well as using them in an environmentally sound manner.

Green disposal — refurbishing and reusing old computers and properly recycling unwanted computers and other electronic equipment.

Green design — designing energy-efficient and environmentally sound components, computers, servers, cooling equipment, and data centers

Green manufacturing — manufacturing electronic components, computers, and other associated subsystems with minimal impact on the environment


These four paths span a number of focus areas and activities, including

- design for environmental sustainability
- energy-efficient computing
- power management
- data center design, layout, and location
-server virtualization
- responsible disposal and recycling

- regulatory compliance

- green metrics, assessment tools, and methodology

- environment-related risk mitigation

- use of renewable energy sources and eco-labeling of IT products

Approaches to green computing

Algorithmic efficiency
The efficiency of algorithms has an impact on the amount of computer resources required for any given computing function and there are many efficiency trade-offs in writing programs.

A study by Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard, estimated that the average Google search released 7 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2). However, Google disputes this figure, arguing instead that a typical search produces only 0.2 grams of CO2. So the energy consumed to run a program can vary on the efficiency of the algorithms.


Virtualization
Computer virtualization refers to the abstraction of computer resources, such as the process of running two or more logical computer systems on one set of physical hardware.

With virtualization, a system administrator could combine several physical systems into virtual machines on one single, powerful system, thereby unplugging the original hardware and reducing power and cooling consumption.


Terminal Servers
When using terminal servers, users connect to a central server; all of the computing is done at the server level but the end user experiences the operating system.

These can be combined with thin clients, which use up to 1/8 the amount of energy of a normal workstation, resulting in a decrease of energy costs and consumption.

Power management
The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), an open industry standard, allows an operating system to directly control the power saving aspects of its underlying hardware.

This allows a system to automatically turn off components such as monitors and hard drives after set periods of inactivity.

Some programs allow the user to manually adjust the voltages supplied to the CPU, which reduces both the amount of heat produced and electricity consumed. This process is called undervolting.

Some CPUs can automatically under volt the processor depending on the workload; this technology is called "SpeedStep" on Intel processors, "PowerNow!"/"Cool'n'Quiet" on AMD chips, LongHaul on VIA CPUs, and LongRun with Transmeta processors.

Recently there is a new solution area emerging, that provides tools to automatically minimize the power consumption of computers in corporate or educational networks by monitoring computer activity and putting computers into power saving modes if they are idle.


Power supply
Desktop computer power supplies (PSUs) are generally 70–75% efficient, dissipating the remaining energy as heat.

An industry initiative called 80 PLUS certifies PSUs that are at least 80% efficient; typically these models are drop-in replacements for older, less efficient PSUs of the same form factor.

As of July 20, 2007, all new Energy Star 4.0-certified desktop PSUs must be at least 80% efficient.


Storage
Smaller form factor (e.g. 2.5 inch) hard disk drives often consume less power per gigabyte than physically larger drives.

Unlike hard disk drives, solid-state drives store data in flash memory or DRAM. With no moving parts, power consumption may be reduced somewhat for low capacity flash based devices.

In a recent case study Fusion-io, manufacturers of the world's fastest Solid State Storage devices, managed to reduce the carbon footprint and operating costs of MySpace data centers by 80% while increasing performance speeds beyond that which is was attainable by multiple hard disk drives in Raid 0. In response, MySpace was able to permanently retire several of their servers, including all heavy-load servers, further reducing their carbon footprint.

As hard drive prices have fallen, storage farms have tended to increase in capacity to make more data available online. This includes archival and backup data that would formerly have been saved on tape or other offline storage.

The increase in online storage has increased power consumption. Reducing the power consumed by large storage arrays, while still providing the benefits of online storage, is a subject of ongoing research.


Video Card
A fast GPU may be the largest power consumer in a computer.
Energy efficient display options include:
1. No video card - use a shared terminal, shared thin client, or desktop sharing software if display required.
2. Use motherboard video output - typically low 3D performance and low power.
3. Select a GPU based on average wattage or performance per watt.


Display
Some newer displays use an array of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in place of the fluorescent bulb, which reduces the amount of electricity used by the display.


Operating system issues
Due to Microsoft's dominance of the huge desktop operating system market this may have resulted in more energy waste than any other initiative by other vendors.

Microsoft Windows Vista has improved this by adding basic central power management configuration. The basic support offered has been unpopular with system administrators who want to change policy to meet changing user requirements or schedules.

Several software products have been developed to fill this gap including Auto Shutdown Manager, Data Synergy PowerMAN, Faronics Power Save, 1E NightWatchman, Verdiem Surveyor/Edison, Verismic Power Manager, WakeupOnStandBy (WOSB), TOff and Greentrac (also promotes behavioral change) among others.


Materials recycling/ Dematerialisation
Recycling computing equipment can keep harmful materials such as lead, mercury, and hexavalent chromium out of landfills, but often computers gathered through recycling drives are shipped to developing countries where environmental standards are less strict than in North America and Europe.

Computing supplies, such as printer cartridges, paper, and batteries may be recycled as well.

The substitution of high carbon products and activities with low carbon alternatives e.g. paper with e-billing – could play a substantial role in reducing emissions.

Online billing, media and music, replacing paper and CDs all reduce the emissions associated with their manufacture and distribution.

Attractive offers that allow service upgrades without trading the phone/computer in are already increasing the life of the mobile/computer device itself.

For example, A global closed-loop reverse supply chain has enabled Cisco to collect nearly 24 million pounds of returned electronic equipment, more than 99 percent of which was recycled or reused. The networking giant offers a discount on new products in exchange for returned equipment. Redeploying that unwanted equipment saved Cisco $153 million in fiscal 2009, the company said in its just-released Corporate Social Responsibility report.


Telecommuting
Teleconferencing and telepresence technologies are often implemented in green computing initiatives.

The advantages are many; increased worker satisfaction, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions related to travel, and increased profit margins as a result of lower overhead costs for office space, heat, lighting, etc.


Reducing data centre emissions
Higher adoption rates of virtualization architectures and low energy cooling would help achieve step changes in efficiency.

Data centre location to reduce cooling needs. For example, Google is constructing a data center near a sea shore which according to them will reduce the energy and cost in cooling off their data center.

At the Supercomputing 2009 conferencing, Iceotope unveiled a new technology to allow servers to be cooled by immersion in water, a new design that the company estimates could cut energy used to cool data centers by as much as 93 percent.


Green power generation
Companies can do this by purchasing renewable electricity, by installing renewable generation on their sites and by making renewable electricity integral to their products.

In fact, the sector is uniquely placed to partner with power companies to optimize the existing electricity grid to allow more efficient power distribution and enable the use of more renewable or green power.

For example, an £80m (US $130.3 million) green data center under construction in east London will use 9 megawatts (MW) of surplus heat created by racks of servers to power residential and business properties in the surrounding area.

As well as capturing waste heat for re-use, the site will also feature a solar array designed to provide the facility with 6,000 kWh of power a year.

With the installation of a 500 kilowatt wind turbine on its manufacturing facility, Other World Computing says it is the world's first 100 percent wind-powered IT Company. The wind turbine will generate an estimated 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of energy per year, which is more than double the amount OWC says it needs to power its LEED Platinum facility and data center.

It's a corporate responsibility towards the society and it's also a smart way of doing business which in turn proves to be an economic in it's model. So go green is a new mantra everyone is talking and practicing now days.

Cheers,
Vijay...