Green It- show me the measurement - by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jan 25 2010) Power and Cooling , Carbon Footprint , Carbon Reduction Commitment

1. 

   It won't be a surprise to readers of Green Data Center News that reducing energy use is about making money, but not everyone sees it that way. 

   "Rather than pushing the green agenda down the priority list, a new report [from Frost & Sullivan] has found that the economic downturn may have actually made businesses in the ICT sector pay more attention to the subject, as a way to cut costs," reported my site, eWEEK Europe UK this week. As my daughters might say, well, duh! 

   We've known all along that cutting waste of any kind should make businesses more efficient and the green agenda is always at least partly about the money. What is interesting about the Frost Report, and another one from hosting specialist On365 is the increasing realisation that Green IT fundamentally has to be all about the measurement. 

   The Frost report looks at green IT in the telecoms sector - where we recently saw Alcatel Lucent's Bell Labs making some big promises about future power reductions. What impresses Frost & Sullivan principal analyst Sharifah Amirah, however, is that companies are getting better at reporting what they are doing: “IBM seems to be the most advanced in its measurements of environmental investments while British Telecom should finalise its ROI models for a range of solutions in the run up to the 2012 Olympics.” Environmental figures will feature in companies' annual financial reports, "similar to the triple bottom line accounting approach," says Amirah. 

   Data center management company On365, meanwhile, is issuing warnings about one of the first instances where this kind of accounting will be enforced - the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment, a cap and trade scheme which comes into force in April, and which will require large companies to monitor and report their power use. 

   Now the CRC is at least slightly controversial. Because there are no "real" financial incentives to reduce emissions, cap and trade introduces a somewhat artificial economy that creates those incentives. As an artificial system, it can have unintended consequences, and BT and other companies have claimed that the CRC changes the rules so that their plans to generate their own renewable electricity in wind farms will become  uneconomic. 

   But On365's warning is that companies may simply not be ready for cap and trade. And how should they get ready? Well, you've probably guessed. It's all about measurement. The company suggests three steps to CRC readiness for users of data centers. The first is to actually find and expose the bills for your data center's power. In a survey On365 found that more than half of data centre managers and finance officers don't actually see the data center power bill. 

   The second step is to put in a "dashboard", a tool which makes the power usage visible and gives managers a chance to drill down, explore and reduce it. Without this sort of measurement, any move to cut costs is simply blind guessworl. 

   It's only the third step that actually starts to make actions, and that should start with asset management, says On365, using tools such as the EU code of conduct on data center efficiency 

   I'm guessing that these are only the first of many people who will tell us this year to get measuring, and by the end of 2010, we may all be sick of hearing the mantra. I hope that by that time, the world's data centers are a much better monitored environment, and power usage is moving in the right direction.  

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