IBM announced enterprise additions to its Project Big Green this week, a week after HP announced its Sustainability Laboratory. Both vendors have a history of interest in this area, but HP has achieved a higher profile for its efforts.
The HP announcement included long-term datacentre issues while IBM concentrated on new product releases to help in this area. However, there were large areas of agreement and overlap in the two presentations, and both said that energy use has become a high-level concern for enterprises, which will grow in importance.
Both see an immediate opportunity for savings in energy use with a strong financial investment case through monitoring and intelligent control systems. IBM talks of the payback period from investments in this area being less than two years. Both back these claims with case studies, although at this early stage these are thin on the ground at present. The environmental payback period may be longer where this involves hardware replacement.
• Both initiatives contrast with recent research published on sourcingfocus.com, which suggested that many clients – in fact, a majority of organisations – are not able to make their datacentre usage more efficient or environmentally friendly as they lack either the skills or the will to tackle the issue, to deactivate so-called ghost servers, or even to make use of the energy efficiency controls on servers within the datacentre.
• The issue is a pressing one, as IT systems usage worldwide now matches the carbon footprint of the global airline industry – each contributing roughly two percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.
The datacentre energy problem
The demands on information processing systems are growing exponentially. For example IBM expects server usage to grow six-fold and the volume of stored data to grow 70-fold over the decade, and these figures are consistent with Ovum's research.
Technology is delivering efficiency improvements, but these tend to be linear in nature. Consequently energy use by datacentres is still rising rapidly. In the longer term we need changes in business processes, data retention practice and law, and a change in expectations. In particular the desire for richer presentation media is placing exponential demands on datacentres, such as replacing pictures with movies.
We need to question how much processing we do, and how much data we hold, and for how long. The present tendency to hold everything that it is technologically possible to hold will have to be challenged. We need systems that can store a single copy of a document and not replicate it multiple times across the organisation, without this placing complexity on users. If a practice is worth doing we will need to justify it by identifying balancing savings outside the realm of the datacentre.
HP's long-term vision
HP has demonstrated its commitment to long-term improvement in this area by designating sustainable computing as one of the five areas that HP Labs will focus on, and by including a project in its initial agenda to develop optical computing. This is an important element in its long-term objective of cutting datacentre energy use by 75%.
The replacement of copper by fibre optic cable carrying laser signals will deliver major energy savings in data centre communications, and eventually in the processor chip. It will allow much greater density of processing within a single chip. HP has set itself a target of five years for delivering on this vision, which we regard as being at the optimistic end of the spectrum.
The medium term: monitoring and intelligent control
HP claims it has achieved a 40% energy saving at a new datacentre it has recently built in Bangalore by deploying its smart cooling technology. IBM claims similar savings in the short term by deploying its current technology including its new monitoring systems. Tivoli monitoring software has been extended from processor monitoring to include all aspects of the data centre facility. It monitors kilowatts of power consumption, and not just processor utilisation. It provides connections into several important business activities to make it an attractive proposition for business:
• Green business services: for example detecting 'brownout' situations and invoking business continuity services.
• Intelligent chargeback: bringing business accountability into the picture
• Optimising asset usage
• Energy-aware provisioning, so that servers can be selected for each workload based on their ability to meet required service levels and minimise cost.
HP has shown a commendable attention to lifetime issues in its green IT agenda. This is continuing in the current announcement. It points out that the energy required to smelt bauxite into aluminium to make a server is equivalent to the energy the server will use in two years of its life. It is now embarking on a project to build up a database of lifecycle energy consumption to create a comprehensive database from which lifecycle issues can be more accurately evaluated. It promises to put the results in the public domain, and is appealing for partners to help populate this.
The immediate future
IBM is using this platform to attract attention to technical advances in some areas of its IT infrastructure products, such as improved storage products and its partnership with VMware to deliver virtualisation to its customers. Virtualisation can reduce hardware requirements by a factor of six, cutting hardware and operating costs in half. Energy costs can be reduced by between 10% and 40%. Of course this also plays to IBM's strengths in providing suitable servers for virtualised environments.
• Despite these very welcome initiatives by two large vendors, the onus rests equally on education, management and enforcement of green initiatives within customer companies to minimise the environmental impact of their data systems and assets. This would be a key area of differentiation between the newly merged HP/EDS and their main rival, IBM: not just greener products, services and policies, but a down-the-line education programme to ensure all the facilities are both understood and used.
