"Green IT" is a concept small and midsize companies are hearing a lot about, but the thought of making an investment in green can make business owners blue. However, as Ron Bednar of Emerson Network Power explains, there are a number of steps companies can take to reduce energy costs and actually save a lot of green, as well.
Going green can be as simple as switching to energy-efficient light bulbs to virtualizing your hardware, networks, storage, and applications. But where to start? And will your company get something out of green IT, other than the satisfaction of helping preserve the planet? bMighty talked to Ron Bednar, the manager of strategic marketing in the Liebert products business of Emerson Network Power about his thoughts on green IT at small and midsize companies.
bMighty: Why go green?
Ron Bednar: There are a lot of benefits, and I'm just speaking from the server and data center perspective. One is you reduce your operating costs. If you can reduce the energy you consume and you spend 10 cents per kilowatt hour, you'll save money. If you can implement some strategies to reduce energy consumption in a data center or server room, you free up space, power capacity, and cooling capacity, and then you can do more with those assets -- so you've freed up resources to do more with those resources.
bMighty: What are some green IT practices that small and midsize companies can easily adopt?
Ron Bednar: There are quite a few. No. 1 is you can implement best practices within data centers and server rooms. You can optimize the air flow, you can use blanking panels -- which, if you have a rack of servers, you can use blanking panels in those racks where there aren't servers, and they help optimize the servers -- and you can look at hot aisles and cold aisles. [Cold aisle containment allows cooling units to run at reduced capacity to achieve ideal cooling conditions and save energy costs. This tactic is more efficient and effective than hot aisle containment systems and offers a better environment for data center personnel.]
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From a cooling-systems perspective, you can use a variable speed drive in the cooling system that can recognize reduced loads and operate more efficiently -- the capacity of the cooling system will go up and down depending on the load. So by allowing the cooling systems to adjust to the IT load, you're saving energy.
Also, look for ghost servers. These are servers that are running but aren't running an application or doing any work. Eliminating ghost servers saves energy.
As for investing in new data center infrastructure, these days there are more green products: high-density cooling systems, which bring equipment closer to the rack, and more efficient uninterruptible power supplies (UPS).
bMighty: Is there a return on investment with green IT?
Ron Bednar: We want to see an ROI with green IT, and most companies we talk with want to see a good ROI as well. So to help give more information to the industry, we've published a white paper called "Energy Logic: Reducing Data Center Energy Consumption By Creating Savings That Cascade Across Systems." It gives paybacks, ROI, and total cost of ownership (TCO). It gives guidelines to businesses that don't know where to start. It gives guidance on what the ROI would be for certain strategies and how companies should prioritize, depending on what type of computer room they have.
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bMighty: Who needs to get green initiatives started at a smaller company?
Ron Bednar: A lot of times it starts at the IT manager level. What we also see is it varies by the size of the company but that the IT manager tends to talk to a facilities manager or an operations manager because of the impact on infrastructure. The IT manager also talks to who pays the utility bill. It starts with the IT manager because he or she is serving a lot of internal customers, but then it becomes a partnership so that they're taking care of the needs of employees while reducing the energy bill.
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Jennifer Moline is associate editor of bMighty.com.
