GreenIT - all ideas welcome

[flymo]

Hi all,

We are running an internal Ideation exercise at work. Its basically a system that allows us to capture ideas from a wide audiance on various subjects with a view to using most promising ones.

I work at Unilever and we have some ambitious plans to reduce our carbon footprint substantially at the same time as the company grows.

On the basis that many people together can generate more ideas I wondered if the combined wisdom of the .org might care to throw a few ideas into the pot.

The current theme is around the use of IT to enable energy saving or carbon footprint reduction in all areas of our organisation. As you might imagine its a very large company and so the potential to reduce energy consumption is equally large in all sorts of areas.

So, any bright ideas out there?

Work from home. Use skype, email and the telephone.

No driving
No office to run
No boss breathing hot air down your neck.

[pmapp]

Power Out is some good software to manage turning machines off across the network.

http://www.visionsoft.com/product.asp?prod=PO

It has the potential to save a lot of wonga, it's something we're planning at the mo'

[flymo]

Originally Posted by gettin2dizzy

Work from home. Use skype, email and the telephone.

No driving
No office to run
No boss breathing hot air down your neck.

Yeah, this is one we are actively working on already.

Obvious one, or maybe to some it's not - Server virtualisation, fewer pieces of physical kit result in lower carbon footprint, including VMware DPM, etc

Not so obvious - increase the temperature that you run your datacentres at. They don't need to be at 21 degrees, the equipment will run at 25 degrees quite happily. Gartner estimate that between 80 and 120 percent of the power consumption of your servers, is used all over again to provide cooling. Also look at the optimal ceiling height in your datacentres, too low and it heats up to easily, too high and it takes more energy to cool.

[TSM]

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

Obvious one, or maybe to some it's not - Server virtualisation, fewer pieces of physical kit result in lower carbon footprint, including VMware DPM, etc

Not so obvious - increase the temperature that you run your datacentres at. They don't need to be at 21 degrees, the equipment will run at 25 degrees quite happily. Gartner estimate that between 80 and 120 percent of the power consumption of your servers, is used all over again to provide cooling. Also look at the optimal ceiling height in your datacentres, too low and it heats up to easily, too high and it takes more energy to cool.

Ambient External Server Air Temp or Internal Server Air Temp?
Reson i say is that some servers with banks of HDDs in the front will have a higher internal temp, my server room is at 20C but the internal server temps are up around 23-25 etc, i want to run higher air con temp though.

[flymo]

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

Obvious one, or maybe to some it's not - Server virtualisation, fewer pieces of physical kit result in lower carbon footprint, including VMware DPM, etc

Not so obvious - increase the temperature that you run your datacentres at. They don't need to be at 21 degrees, the equipment will run at 25 degrees quite happily. Gartner estimate that between 80 and 120 percent of the power consumption of your servers, is used all over again to provide cooling. Also look at the optimal ceiling height in your datacentres, too low and it heats up to easily, too high and it takes more energy to cool.

We certainly need to do more of this but its happening fairly slowly. One idea we have considered is to energy rate each solution encompassing all its associated parts (server, storage, network, racking etc) and then looking to see if we can do things differently to reduce or remove that solutions footprint.

[flymo]

Just as a pointer, we can also think beyond IT. Things that IT can enable.

[squirrel_hunter]

Wake On LAN is something that we started to look at, I wasn't involved with that POC but my understanding of it was a central service would run to turn off workstations remotely at the end of the day and then switch them back on in time for opening.

Of course that would depend on the type of workstation your company has as it a hardware feature on the network card. It would also depend on if your users would be receptive to this, ie working times, who uses the workstation and for what.

Other than that Virtulisation is the way forward. But stay away from Cloud Computing as so far from what I can tell its the latest bullsh!t buzz word.

But what do I know? I'm just a code monkey...

[flymo]

Originally Posted by squirrel_hunter

But stay away from Cloud Computing as so far from what I can tell its the latest bullsh!t buzz word.

Nah, dont agree with this at all. Cloud compute is nothing new but what it can deliver is economy on a grand scale. We have looked at what Google and Amazon are doing in this area and they are able to provide utility computing at energy levels far more efficiently then we can.

There are other benefits but energy cunsumption reduction is way up there on the list.