In our recent BusinessGreen web seminar on the practical steps IT managers can take to limit their firm’s environmental footprint, we put viewers’ questions to a panel of three experts. The panellists were: John Madden, research director at industry analyst Ovum; Martin Niemer, senior product marketing manager for Europe at virtualisation software specialist VMware; and Ian Osborne, project director for trade association Intellect’s Grid Computing Now initiative. Here are their answers:

Audience question: I want to develop greener IT strategies and deploy greener technologies, but how do I get the support of the board?

Madden: Well, I think that cost is a good attention grabber. Explain to your board how much this [energy] inefficient kit is costing you year over year. Explain the implications of that; and explain to your employees that your ability to invest in other areas is impacted because of the need to invest in rising energy costs. That should at least get the discussion going. Then you can start to point out the benefits that come with the current generation of more energy-efficient IT and cooling technologies.

The green agenda is being driven by big multinational companies. Is there a case for small organisations to embrace green IT or is it just for the big boys?
Osborne: It applies to everyone. We all have electricity bills, whether it’s at home, in a small business, or a large business – it’s just the number of zeros on the end that tends to change. I think it’s worthwhile for any size of business to understand what its energy costs are and what it can do about that. I have a colleague in the industry who is running a web hosting utility and she started the business on the basis that it would be at least a carbon-neutral operation. That is a small business in itself and it is offering its service to other small firms. So I think these principles apply everywhere and they save you money everywhere.

But does that apply to all green technologies? If you’re a company running just 80 servers can you still justify an investment in virtualisation software for example?

Niemer: It is absolutely also for the smaller customers and we are seeing more and more smaller customers starting on virtualisation. Savings are just the same. It’s not only that you get 90 per cent cost savings for the servers, which even if you’re running just 80 servers is still a lot of money. But there are also a lot of other benefits to virtualised environments, like higher availability and improved disaster recovery. I think there are still big benefits for smaller firms.

Plenty of outsourcing companies are saying it is greener to hand over our IT to them, surely that is just fobbing off our carbon footprint on to somebody else?

Madden: That is a risk, but a lot of the outsourcers and service providers are going through the same soul searching that many internal IT departments are going through with energy consumption and carbon emissions, just on an even bigger scale. Because of their scale they are in a good position to take steps to reduce energy consumption. HP is a good example: it is consolidating from some 86 datacentres to six and what it’s talking about is a radically new datacentre design, new cooling technologies and power consumption technologies and great energy efficiency standards. It should then be able to fulfil some of those infrastructure and application needs for customers and do it in a more energy-efficient way than could be done internally.

Niemer: With a company that essentially operates as a datacentre provider, the energy cost is a much higher part of their entire business cost. As a result they want to focus a lot more on saving energy than somebody at a normal business where the energy bill is only five per cent or less of overall costs.

So the specialists, such as outsourcers and hosting software providers, might have a leadership position when it comes to green IT?

Madden: Yes, I think initially they’ll lead the way. But as a customer you do need to be careful. Not all providers will be able to deliver services in a green way.

Our output devices such as printers, faxes and scanners are always on and have a big environmental impact in terms of their energy and paper. Are there ways to reduce this impact?

Osborne: There are definitely things you can do. Within our organisation we’ve implemented a new plan for printing, whereby we charge for colour pages printed on the volume printers. What we’re aiming to do is to encourage a responsible attitude to the use of printing. You often see nowadays at the bottom of an email, “Please consider the environment before printing this email”. I sometimes wonder whether we ought to put the reminder on the email application itself that says “Please consider the environment before you send the email”. But I think there’s an opportunity here to think again about the costs that go into paper, how paper is used, how it’s recycled, for example. All those should be part of a responsible print strategy.

All the vendors say they have the most energy-efficient hardware. How do I distinguish between them? Is there some sort of green quality mark?

Madden: There is an industry body called The Green Grid that is trying to develop some standards. The group comprises a very interesting mix of vendors who want to move to this point because their customers are interested in it. But at the same time they would all like nothing better than for customers to choose their servers, so it’s a matter of juggling any new standards with the need of the vendor community to promulgate their products moving forward. I think that we’re quickly moving towards developing those kinds of standards – a benchmark that’s going to give consumers at least some objectivity when it comes to assessing what vendors are telling them in terms of the energy efficiency of their products. There is also the Energy Star label for efficient PCs and there is also talk of an Energy Star label for servers as well.

Are there any tools out there that can be used on an ongoing basis to measure IT’s carbon footprint and the progress that we’re making as a department?

Osborne: To some extent it’s a bit of a research task at the moment to get those metrics. But there are some tools out there and I did notice IBM making an announcement recently about having a tool for monitoring energy use, so I think these tools are fast approaching.

Niemer: The rule of thumb is that you use 3,000kw/h a year per server workload, and you can add the same amount again for cooling and your uninterruptible power supply.

Have the companies that have used virtualisation software to cut energy use had to upgrade their servers to higher-spec machines? If so, doesn’t that negate some of the environmental savings of the technology?

Niemer: Some have upgraded others have continued to use the same server estate. The benefit if you buy new servers is that you get more cores. You can go 16 or 32 cores per server, which actually increases your virtualisation ratio dramatically, so you can go up to 15:1, 20:1. So it’s mostly just a cost calculation if you want to buy a new server or go with the old ones. If you can double your virtualisation ratio, then you can easily justify a server that has more CPU power. And [you have to remember that with modern kit] if you have twice as much CPU, you’re not going to consume twice the power. So having more cores is even more energy efficient than having multiple machines with a lower number of cores.

Is it more environmentally friendly to upgrade to a more energy-e fficient box, or should you just sweat the assets that you’ve got for as long as possible, given how environmentally damaging it can be to build these products?

Osborne: You can look at the running costs of a modern box and compare them with the running and maintenance costs of older boxes and the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process and I think you’ll know the answer to that question when you do the maths.

Madden: When you are looking at the question of upgrades you have to include line-of-business folks in that decision. It’s not just a straight IT proposition. Business managers are going to want to have some assurances that if you stick with these older boxes for a certain amount of time that they can run whatever systems are needed to keep productivity up and satisfy customers and suppliers. It has to be a business decision as much as an IT one.

Is there a trade-off in terms of going green and reducing power consumption and the ability to run an efficient, modern IT infrastructure?

Osborne: I gave an example earlier of a small business that is both efficient and green. It’s a green-focused web hosting service that is running for profit. I’m sure it’s going to cause some stress, particularly in the established organisations, but I’m sure it’s possible to do this. It’s just a question of thinking differently about how you plan and manage your infrastructure.