Green IT

Green IT refers to the environmentally sustainable computing or IT. According to one definition Green IT is “an organization’s ability to systematically apply environmental sustainability criteria to the design, production, sourcing, use and disposal of the IT technical infrastructure as well as within the human and managerial components of the existing IT infrastructure”. Another definition says Green IT is “the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems—efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment”. All definitions of Green IT talk about the environment friendly ways of doing business. At one side we need resources for productive work and on the other side we need to dispose the waste generated in the process. The colour green reminds us the colour of nature, this Green IT concept gives ideas about IT can help in reducing carbon emission and effective use of energy. In the coming paragraphs, we discuss more on this.

It is widely assumed that a typical computer uses about .65 kilowatts per hour (kWh) in use, or .35kWh (stand-by) and .03kWh in hibernate mode. Assuming that the computer spends 220 working days with 12 hours in operational mode (1716kW) and 12 hours in standby mode (924kW), and spends 24 hours in hibernate mode for the remaining 145 days (104kW), it will consume 2145 kW of electricity. According to UK government figures, 1kWh produces 0.51kg of carbon dioxide (CO2), and 1,960kWh produces 1 tonne of CO2. This makes allowance for the fact that with current nuclear capacity (which is reducing) some 15% of electricity is generated without producing any CO2. This means that a single PC in office mode costs an insignificant amount to run (£16.00 per annum), but generates 1.094 tonnes of CO2 per annum equivalent to the CO2 produced by a single passenger flying from London to Cairo – spread this across a distributed desktop environment of 2,000 PCs and you have an annual carbon footprint of 2,188 tonnes of CO2.

The above given description may give us a feel that IT industry is one of the major cause of global carbon emission but according to Gartner Research the contribution of IT industry is 2% of total carbon emission which is equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by aviation industry. What about the rest 98%? The good side of this is IT can do a lot regarding this. There are substantial inefficiencies in the technology and use behaviors that can be readily addressed and IT can significantly contribute to control and reduce the 98% of CO2 emissions caused by other activities and industries.

In order to understand the Green IT prospects of a company, we can do G readiness analysis. G readiness analysis consists of five dimensions: attitude, policy, practice, governance and technology. Awareness and concern of IT people regarding the climate change due IT artifacts and operations is represented by attitude dimension. It can be reflected in the IT   organizations concern to improve the energy efficiency in managing the IT technical infrastructure, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste. Green IT Policy encompasses the frameworks an organization has developed and put in place to apply environmental sustainability criteria throughout its value chain including IT sourcing, IT operations and services and IT end-of-life management. Green IT Practice refers to what extent an IT organization has translated its Green IT concerns and policies into actions along the IT activity value chain. Green IT Technology reflects the extent to which the IT organization acquires and builds a more environmentally effective IT infrastructure. Green IT Governance is the operating model that defines the administration of Green IT initiatives and is closely related to the policy dimension. These five dimensions help the organization to improve its performance a Green IT company.

The NASSCOM Green IT initiative is holistic and focuses on the following areas:

•  Make IT Green: Adoption by industry of green technologies and practices including green buildings, green computing infrastructure (energy efficient data centers, power efficient computers etc.) sharing infrastructure (shared data centres etc) and addressing issues like e-waste management.

• Make Green Happen Through IT: Deploy IT solutions  which help firms & businesses become green including like cloud computing, video-conferencing, intelligent transport systems, web-conferencing, motion and heat detection sensors among others.

• Make Green Warriors: Encourage the over 2 million employees of the IT-BPO industry to adopt a Green life-style and thereby become change agents to create a sustainable impact in the society around themselves through increasing awareness and more importantly changing behaviors.

Various models are available to assess the Green IT aspects of the IT organizations. Various certifications like ‘energy star’ are available to encourage the Green IT concept.  For a better future and for a better environment, we have to practice green.  We need to work on the unnecessary power consumption practices we have. We can address so many things by a just behaviour change. In order to reduce the waste, the companies should work on the life span of the products. Various approaches that an IT organization can follow include product longevity, software and deployment optimisation, power management, material recycling and telecommuting.

Product longevity refers the making of products with bigger ecological footprint which means longer life cycle. This will reduce the e-waste and thus contribute towards the Green IT movement. Software and deployment optimization refers the best optimized practices in software making which will reduce the usage of the hardware resources and that will help to keep the globe green. Areas to be taken care in this regard include algorithmic efficiency, optimized resource allocation, more virtualization and effective and efficient use of terminal servers. The power management aspects look into the reduction in power consumption by the IT systems in the world.  In power management, we concentrate on reducing power consumption at data centres. Cloud computing has a good role here. Another area that we concentrate is the operating system support in reducing power consumption, this can be done by providing option like sleep mode, hibernate etc. We already have such options, but we need to fine tune the power control options of operating system. Power supplies are another area where the companies can concentrate. We can use switched mode power supplies instead of LDO based ones which consumes more power for the voltage conversions in the PCB. Storage video card and display are some more areas where we can improve the power consumption. By using the latest technologies for storage and display, we can drastically reduce the power consumption.