Earth Day warning for green IT

Today is Earth Day 2010

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, environmental and industry experts have warned that, although IT firms have made progress in embracing greener measures, there is still a lot of work to be done and that the big challenges lie ahead.

Earth Day was founded by US senator Gaylord Nelson to raise awareness of environmental issues. However, it appears that its ethos is still to be fully implemented in the IT industry.

A recent Greenpeace report, Make IT Green argued that companies providing cloud services need to phase out the use of "dirty" sources of energy such as coal, and look to cleaner, renewable energy sources.

The report pointed to Apple's North Carolina facility which uses just 3.8 per cent of renewable energy compared with 50.75 per cent coal and 38.7 nuclear, and Microsoft's Texas datacentre which uses just 11 per cent renewable energy.

It also cited a 2008 study by Smart:2020 called The Climate Group and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative which claimed that cloud computing will require 1,963 billion kW/h of electricity to power the datacentres and telecoms infrastructures hosting its services by 2020, a threefold increase on the power required in 2007.

However, despite these apparently dismal figures, many argue that a lot has been done to make IT greener.

Simon Mingay, a research vice president at Gartner, said that things have improved a lot since 2005, when enterprises rarely asked questions about the environmental performance of a product or a vendor.

"In 2010 that is so very different. All the IT vendors are now having to put significant resources into responding to these questions in RFIs and RFPs. Many enterprises are confused by how to interpret those responses, but they are at least asking and demanding improvements," he said.

Ronda Anceirto, a partner analyst at Ovum, said that the recession had been a big factor in this change.

"The recession has increased companies' interest in green IT. And this has been mainly because firms have realised that energy efficiency is cost efficiency," he said.

Examples of such improvements include the Green Grid, an industry body aimed at helping datacentres monitor and reduce power use, which has launched two online kits enabling datacentre operators to estimate and understand the amount of power they use.

The group has also launched Data Centre 101: Constrained Capacity, an online course aimed at giving operators a better understanding of industry terms and ways to solve everyday challenges.

"The Green Grid operators are in a unique position, so it is important that we use a common vocabulary with consistent and defined terms to help datacentre managers communicate with understanding on issues affecting their operations," said Jon Haas, vice chairman of the Green Grid's technical committee.

Terry Erdle, senior vice president of skills certifications at trade organisation CompTIA, expressed a similar sentiment.

"To fulfil the promise of green IT, technology professionals must add new skills unique to its environment," he said.

To facilitate this change, CompTIA has launched a special exam designed to test green skills. The Strata Green IT exam covers a wide array of environmental issues, deployments and policies, and is aimed at IT professionals, decision makers and facilities managers.

Large corporations have also taken steps to improve energy efficiency. IBM announced new management system requirements yesterday designed to improve sustainability across its global network of suppliers.

The company will require firms with which IBM holds a direct commercial relationship to establish and follow a management system to address their corporate and environmental responsibilities.

"IBM has always expected its suppliers to operate in an environmentally responsible manner, but now we're strengthening that focus with a management system requirement," said Wayne Balta, vice president of corporate environmental affairs and product safety at IBM.

In a similar vein, Alcatel Lucent launched its GreenTouch consortium in January, which comprises 16 founding members from industry, academia and government labs to help invent and deliver these radical new energy efficiency improvements.

"Our goal is a 1,000-fold improvement in the energy efficiency of communications networks, and to deliver the critical enabling technologies in five years," said Gee Rittenhouse, head of research at Bell Labs.

However, Mark O'Neill, head of service management and green learning consultancy at BCS, and author of soon-to-be-released book Green IT for Sustainable Business Practice, argued that misconceptions about the costs of green IT are still rife, and obstruct the implementation of more widespread green measures.

"There's a strong feeling that being green costs money. A lot of IT managers don't realise that energy-saving measures could save them money. This is true of reducing carbon emissions as well as more common energy-saving measures," he said.

"Large corporations are ahead in energy-efficiency, however, and a lot of their 'green' measures are in part political or PR tools."

Others agree that there's a long way to go, and that the bigger challenges are ahead.

"In 2010 we are at the beginning of the end of what I refer to as Green IT Phase 1. Phase 1 was about the low hanging fruit in the datacentre and at the desktop," said Mingay.

"Green IT phase 2 will be harder because the low hanging fruit has gone, and the business case is less clear cut."

Mingay argued that, although the Greenpeace report had good intentions and was correct in its basic message, it missed the point.

"Greenpeace confused terms and ironically cited the potential key to greater energy efficiency - cloud computing - as the culprit. Really, its critique should have been leveled against IT in general," he said.

"Cloud computing has the potential to substantially improve green IT. It's the big area, if properly utilised. At the moment there have been great attempts to improve green IT, but it's been mainly incremental, small steps. Cloud could change this."

Anceirto and Mingay agreed that, for IT to really be green, it needs to be low carbon as well as energy efficient.

"Being low carbon is crucial to the green agenda, but I'm not sure whether the measuring tools are really available at the moment. A lot of firms don't really know their carbon footprint," said Ascierto.

At the moment it seems that green improvements are driven and complicated by other considerations.

"Their heart is not really in it. Google is a good example of this. There are no figures for greenhouse gas emissions or targets. There's no evidence that they're really doing anything," said Mingay.

"For things to really change there needs to be greater transparency and better messaging. So on Earth Day 2010 I'd give IT organisations and the IT industry collectively a 'B minus'."