Use lean to go green

Thin clients, virtualisation, server consolidation are all about being lean—and they all reduce energy usage

By Vishwajeet Singh  

When economic concerns got precedence, environmental sustainability had to take a back seat in many organisations. The fact however, remains that being “lean and green” is good for both the business and the environment. Any organisation that focuses on this will see clear benefits coming in soon.
I’m a great believer in Green IT and strongly feel that a few small steps and best practices can go a long way in bringing benefits of ‘green’ to the table.
Optimum utilisation of resources: An optimum use of all the available resources can bring down our energy wastage to its minimum level. This is not only applicable for a data centre environment; it can easily be applied to a regular office condition too.
Many times we don’t realise that we actually don’t need powerful workstations, even thin-client architecture can work absolutely fine for many of our requirements. We should actually do a proper study on our department wise setups and accordingly provide what is needed.
Energy-efficient operation also means operating a device that uses only as much energy as necessary to fulfil its intended function. The primary objective of an effective energy management is to eliminate or minimise energy wastage while maintaining a comfortable and safe environment.
Adoption of virtualisation: As we all know, our servers are among the most energy consuming devices, so it is very important to know our server requirements clearly. Today, we are being asked to improve efficiency, not only from a capital expenditure perspective, but also with regard to operational overheads.
By migrating applications from physical to virtual machines and consolidating applications onto shared physical hardware we can save a lot on energy bills, year-on-year maintenance costs, cooling needs and real estate cost.
Run routine checkup of all passive devices: Often we don’t actually look into the energy utilisation of our passive devices like UPS, which itself is an energy consuming piece of equipment. On one side, it gives us an uninterrupted power supply, on the other it also burns a significant amount of energy.
A proper audit and maintenance of devices, like UPS and air conditioners, can help bring down their energy utilisation to optimum levels.
Motivate your people: We all understand that money works and what is the harm in sharing it when you are gaining on the other side. Incentives schemes can help you achieve remarkable results in a relatively short period of time, if you apply them properly.
Policies can be deployed in data centres for services like standby option and display time out. But if you let your user know quantitatively how much they are burning on each computer every day, they will understand the importance of switching off their screens while going away for tea and other short breaks.
And let them know if the organisation achieved a significant cut in energy bills, they will get some incentives as a token of appreciation.
In addition, the office building also plays a major role when it comes to green efforts. The buildings use approximately 66% of the electric energy, and according to an estimate, the overall power consumption in buildings has doubled between 1989 and 2005.
Also, energy represents as much as 30% of a building’s operating costs. Now consider this: undertaking energy efficiency measures can reduce energy consumption and thus, utility bills by 30% or more. These savings will add directly to the bottom line.
Most energy efficiency measures also improve the comfort and attractiveness of the indoor environment. This is common sense. Lighting retrofits, for example, reduce energy consumption and improve visual acuity. Better vision, in turn, helps workers complete tasks more efficiently while reducing eyestrain.
And the best part is that these improvements to energy efficiency can often be attained through low-cost or even no-cost projects