Grow A Greener Data Center by IT Architect Douglas Alger From Cisco

“Green IT is ultimately about resource efficiency – maximizing what you have and optimizing how it is consumed.  Beyond the admirable environmental benefits from being green, such optimization lets you accomplish more and spend less.”

This is just a sampling of the insight you’ll find below as our Data Center Leaders Interview Series details necessary tactics and quantifiable benefits for taking your data center green.  Helping us is Douglas Alger, IT Architect for Physical Infrastructure from Cisco and author of the book Grow A Greener Data Center.

For anyone who still feels that Green IT is simply an altruistic business fad nearing an end, rather than a significant strategy for saving capital and optimizing power usage, this interview is for you:

Evolving Solutions:
What tips would you offer for businesses prior to launching a Green IT initiative?

Douglas Alger:
Specific to  the Data Center space, I recommend having tools in place to monitor your Data Center resources.

Being able to track power consumption down to the cabinet level, temperature conditions, and hardware utilization is invaluable for developing and implementing Data Center green initiatives.

Monitoring tools can help uncover inefficiencies such as short-cycling of an air handler or which servers in your Data Center are consuming a disproportionate amount of power.  They also can help you prioritize potential improvements, calculate the return on investment, and – after implementation – accurately track efficiency gains.  Without them are you left to guess at the impact of the improvements you are making.

Evolving Solutions:
How would you recommend selling the idea of green IT to upper management who see it as little more than a fad?

Douglas Alger:
I think it’s important to emphasize that green IT is ultimately about resource efficiency – maximizing what you have and optimizing how it is consumed.  Beyond the admirable environmental benefits from being green, such optimization lets you accomplish more and spend less, conditions that are always going to be of interest to a company.

For Data Centers, being green saves money by reducing energy consumption (the largest operational expense of a Data Center) and cutting down on the use of consumable items such as patch cords.  Being green also extends the lifespan of your facility (deferring future construction costs), provides more flexibility to accommodate future technologies, and positions your company well in the event that environmental regulations around energy-efficiency or carbon emissions are enacted in the future.

Evolving Solutions:
With business movements that emerge quickly, such as Green, it is not uncommon for mistakes to be made due to rapid deployment.   What implementation mistakes have you witnessed, in regards to Green IT initiatives?

Douglas Alger:
Companies sometimes launch green initiatives without developing an overall strategy.  That’s fine for the short term and individual green projects can definitely be successful, but as more uncoordinated green activities are initiated you can end up with redundant efforts and other inefficiencies, especially at large companies.

Any green initiative that you can think of – recycling programs, promoting alternate transportation, server virtualization, etc. – are bound to accomplish more if they’re implemented as part an organized program with defined goals.

Evolving Solutions:
Your book, “Grow A Greener Data Center,” walks companies through a bottom-up approach to building a green data center, beginning with physical construction.  For companies that do not have the option to physically build a new data center, what do you recommend as an ideal starting point?

Douglas Alger:
There are a lot of green improvements that can be made to existing server environments that are very low cost, paying for themselves many times over, and easy to implement.  One simple step, for example, is to install timers and motion sensors on your Data Center lighting, causing non-emergency lights to turn off whenever the room is unoccupied.  (This can be done for other building spaces that are unoccupied for extended periods of time as well, such as conference rooms and bathrooms.)

If your Data Center’s power and cabling infrastructure are routed under a raised floor, seal any excess gaps at the floor tile openings where patch cords and power cables enter the plenum space.   This will improve the performance of your cooling system, reducing your energy consumption.

Yet another green improvement that can be implemented unobtrusively is to make energy-efficiency a key purchasing criteria for hardware that goes in your Data Center.  Newer, more energy efficient devices can be introduced as part of your company’s normal refresh cycle for hardware.  This can lead to significant savings over time.  When you factor in a server’s cooling needs and the conversion losses that occur along a Data Center’s power delivery chain, your energy savings will ultimately be nearly three times the number of watts you conserve at the hardware level.

Evolving Solutions:
Toby Velte, Global Technology Strategies with Microsoft, describes how he helps to ensure Green IT initiatives are funded by always relating projects to the pressures of capitalism, rather than the pressures of altruism.  Do you find this to be true across the board, or have you seen some firms consider start to implement green IT purely from a sense of corporate responsibility?

Douglas Alger:
I have seen businesses undertake green activities because they want to do the right thing, but I agree that if you want to truly entrench green initiatives within your company you need to demonstrate their business value.  When budgets get tight, upper management is more likely to cut a “feel good” program than one known to contribute in a proven way to the company’s success.

Evolving Solutions:
Wild Card:  Anything else you would like to add?

Douglas Alger:
Some people don’t immediately associate Data Centers with opportunities to be green.  With the tremendous consumption that occurs in these facilities, though – often 20 to 40 times the energy usage of traditional office space – there are ample opportunities to be more efficient and thereby save energy, save money, and reduce your carbon footprint.