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Green (sustainable) IT is becoming more and more popular for many reasons. A couple of years ago I developed a graduate level Green IT course for a major university. I will be teaching it for the third time this coming semester. It has always gotten good reviews from the students. Most of them have been full time computer science students or IT industry practitioners. I am confident that they will take their learnings back to their organizations or apply them to their new jobs when they graduate.
There are many areas where sustainability can play a large role, but the “lowest hanging fruit” for Green IT is the data center. The first and foremost reason is that there is a huge energy cost to operate a data center. Secondly, or tied for first, is the magnitude of data we collect, move, store, manipulate, and retrieve. Because of that massive amount of data, we need more and more infrastructure, and larger and larger, capacity to handle that data.
Relatively simple solutions are available for reducing energy consumption, therefore electricity costs and carbon dioxide emissions (2 of the three elements of the triple bottom line - profits and planet). Here is an example of a green IT project. I also teach project management at the same university, and one of the requirements for my class is a group project. This semester, one of the groups developed a project plan for a project that we defined in our book as Green by Project Impact (projects that may not have a green outcome like an electric car, but do have an immediate impact on their environment). It is a project to green up a data center by upgrading the servers to thin clients. Think of thin clients as similar to the terminals that were connected to a central computer, before desk tops (although a lot of you will not remember those “good old days”). Take my word for it, there was a time when there was virtually no processing power on the desk , but rather everything had to go through a central computer. With a thin client, the computing power, software, applications, storage and network access are available and managed at a central location.
The student group did a comparison of thin client deployment versus traditional PCs. They found that a thin client uses about 14% of the energy (therefore about 14% of the electrical costs and 14% of the CO2 emissions) than a traditional PC. This is not quite an apples to apples comparison as there are associated costs with the data center, but we have to remember that in most organizations, the data center already exists for storage, backup, etc., therefore is already a cost center. The result in a thin client project deployment is a significant savings in energy consumption which goes right to the bottom-line. Of course there is a cost to the project. The group predicted that a project to deploy 1100 thin clients would be approximately $1.2 million for equipment, $179,000 for resources with a total project cost of approximately $1.4 million. Given that all factors stay the same, energy cost payback period for the entire project would be about 6 years. One factor that makes the project even more attractive is that the average PC is about $1500, the thin client about $300.
In this instance, it is an easier decision by the project manager to recommend a thin client deployment for a data center upgrade. It takes into account the greenality of the project as well as the aspect of cost reduction. The payback period is reasonable and the fact that the thin clients are significantly less expensive makes it more attractive. The final “p” in the triple bottom-line is people, so is there an increase in productivity with thin clients? That question still has to be answered, but as Meat Loaf said, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: December 09, 2013 08:08 PM |
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