Sustainability as a Driver for Profit and Innovation in Indian IT Companies
6.2 Laying the Foundation for Sustainability in IT Companies—the Emergence of Green IT
6.2.3 What is a Green Data Center?
A data center (DC) is a facility that houses a large number of electronic equipment (computers, storage devices etc.). Data centers are used by organizations for the pur- pose of handling the data necessary for their IT operations. IT operations are crucial for the business continuity of the organizations; companies rely on their information systems to run their operations. It is essential to provide a reliable infrastructure for IT operations to store, handle and process organizational data because if these systems become unavailable (known as down time), company operations may be impaired or stopped completely. Green Data center is defined as a DC that uses the optimal quantity of energy to deliver maximum IT productivity. Green DCs are a combination of technology, process and people in addition to using energy saving tools and an optimal level of cooling. Green DCs must create a change management methodology to transform DC technology, process and people to a low carbon future.
As organizations become more global, it has become essential for companies to run their data centers round the clock to ensure availability of essential data as and when required. This is achieved through significant computational redundancy of the hardware used, leading to substantial wastage of power and an increase in the organization’s carbon footprint.
The first decade of the twentyfirst century saw rapid growth and change for data centers globally. In India, data center capacity is growing at a CAGR of 31% and stood at 4.25 million square feet at the end of 20101. In this period, data center managers were forced to react to rapid, continuous changes dictated by the capacity and availability requirements of their organizations, and the density of the equipment being deployed to meet those requirements. As the requirement for data storage increased, data centers became more compact and more powerful, thus generating more heat per square foot of data center space.
A data center’s environment has to be controlled in order to ensure optimal per- formance; the recommended temperature range is 16–24◦C (61–75◦F) and humidity range of 40–55% with a maximum dew point of 15◦C. Due to the tropical climate in India, companies rely on air conditioning to keep the data centers at the right tem- perature. Hence, data centers in India consume more power on an average, because more amount of power is required to operate, cool and maintain them vis-à-vis colder countries. It is estimated that data centers and their servers consume about 23% of power in an IT organization2 and that energy costs which are now at 10% of an average IT budget could escalate to 50% in the future if no significant steps are taken
1http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=808212
2Steve Kleynhans, VP Computing, Gartner presentation “the Green PC Environment”—
presentation, New York, November 2007
to arrest the trend3. Traditional data centers’ efficiency statistics show dismally low figures: an average DC utilizes only 6% of its servers and only 50% of its facilities4 and most DCs run at 15% of capacity or less, idling the rest of the time but still consuming electricity. This, along with the associated environmental cost of running traditional data centers has paved the way for the adoption of green data centers in India.
A green DC is constructed in such a way as to store, manage and disseminate data with maximum energy efficiency and minimal environmental impact. Green DCs not only save energy, but also reduce the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades to deal with increased power and cooling demands. A key aspect of DC greening is consolidation. As a part of DC consolidation, organizations remove under-utilized data centers and distribute their work load over the remaining data centers. This not only increases the efficiency of the remaining data centers, but also saves energy and consequently reduces the carbon foot print of the organization due to reduced operational and cooling costs. It has been estimated that consolidation can raise the utilization of a large DC from 5% to as much as 20% and adoption of this technology in India is forecasted to 29% by end of 2011. Consolidation and DC virtualization by TCS, one of the IT giants of India resulted in 79% savings in power consumed by their servers5.
Power management systems are one of the important constituents of a green data center. It has been estimated that only about one-quarter of the energy coming into a data centre actually goes to the servers and that taking full advantage of power management features and systems can cut data center energy requirements by as much as 20% and increase a data center’s Power Usage Efficiency (PUE)6. This is also known as the Green Grid standard. Determining and improving this metric will help an IT organization create a efficient computing model. PUE is the ratio of total facility power over total IT equipment. Here total facility power is the total power being provided to the DC. Total IT equipment power is the power used by the IT equipment in the DC and includes storage equipment, servers, network equipment, laptops, desktops, switches and display units.
Consequently, several Indian companies with large data centers are seeking expert help in the domain of power management. For example, Emerson, a leader in the field of precision cooling and power management will help Datacraft, a leading IT solutions and services provider in India build six data centers with optimized energy efficiency through advanced power management solutions7.
3Ganesh Mahabala, Regional Director, India and SAARC, VMware “The How and Why of Green DataCenters”
4Data Quest India, May 2008. http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pdf/Data_Centers.pdf
5www.ciio.in/case-study/server-utilization-drives-power-savings-tcs
6IDC: Virtualization and Multicore Innovations Disrupt the Worldwide Server Market”—March 2007
7http://www.emerson.com/en-US/newsroom/news-releases/emerson-business-news/Pages/
Emerson-to-Design-Six-Data-Centers.aspx
6.2.3.1 How to Make the DC Greener?
By consolidating multiple applications on the “least” number of servers provides numerous benefits that include increased server utilization, redundancy elimination, increased performance and decreased maintenance cost. Narasimhan and Raghu- raman (2010) provide a five step process to move towards a low carbon DC. This includes:
• Take Stock of the Current IT Inventory in the Data Center—For each equipment that an IT company is operating, it is important to identify and document the supplier, the technology and its associated applications that are running on this equipment. A manager of the data center should have a clear idea on how the legacy environment has been built for the DC. Issues such as date of manufacture, how many hours has a server logged, the energy productivity of the DC are all important pieces of information to track for the manager. Applications that have not been used effectively in a server and are redundant need to be eliminated. Wipro for example offers a comprehensive Application Rationalization Solution (ARS) that identifies opportunities to eliminate, migrate and modernize the application inventory while helping to build a repository of application inventory
• Quantify the Key Performance Indicators for the Green Data Center—Chillers and computer room air conditioners (CRAC) all consume a great deal of energy moving air around to maintain a cool temperature around the DC. Hence it is critical to quantify some of the KPIs for the green DC that includes the overall performance of IT and the energy performance of the DC. Power usage effective- ness, work load analysis of the IT nodes, Data Center Energy productivity and Data center efficiency are all key KPIs that a green data center should track to remain sustainable.
• Strategize between Short-term and Long term Horizon—Fixing the time horizon is critical for any DC. Since a typical DC deals with end-to-end server, storage and network technology services that can undergo constant churn and change, the DC must devise a comprehensive set of metrics that are differentiated between short term and long term issues. For example, for a typical DC, energy conservation can be achieved by using occupancy sensors, auto vents and building management sensors. This takes a reasonable amount of time to achieve and hence should be considered as a long term strategy.
• Identify Green IT “Opportunities”—A manager should seek opportunities that can increase the efficiency of a DC. Usage of an efficient demand management and capacity planning process so that the DC will possess the right processing power and storage is an important decision to pursue. Additionally, by selecting the right suite of solutions to manage a DC within the prescribed boundaries, this will ensure that energy costs savings are maximized on one hand while any greenhouse gas emissions are minimized on the other hand.
• Implement Best Practices—Virtualization is a technique that can increase server utilization while making the DC leaner. By running virtualization software appli- cation, the manager can run multiple applications on just one server. Wipro, for
example, recommends “Thin Provisioning”, a green DC storage that substantially decreases disk capacity, energy and floor space costs while drastically alleviating storage and system administration on any storage area network. By deployment of monitoring tools, the process of measuring the related metrics that can then lead a DC to its key performance indicators is another best practice that needs to be implemented.
We now move on to discuss how IT companies can practice sustainability through LEED programs.