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The Greening of IT
150 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

Electric Utility in the Chicago Area

This case study is for a large energy utility in the Chicago area. The first
step was to evaluate and analyze energy use at the customer’s data centers.
The energy utility in the Chicago area was already in the process of working
with rate case information and was interested in establishing rate case incen-
tives on green data center technology for their customers.
Green data center initiatives for this energy utility cover a broad spec-
trum, including installation of efficient cooling towers and variable speed
blowers, as well as the use of energy efficient IT systems such as virtual
servers, blade centers, and virtual data storage.
An important process was to increase energy-efficiency awareness by the
customer for all of the customer’s IT development and management teams.
As part of this energy-efficiency awareness, the IT team is considering modi-
fying some customer architectural document templates to include a section
on estimated server energy use. That new section could also contain a subsec-
tion on estimated emissions and an estimate of reduced emissions using—for
example, virtual servers instead of stand-alone servers. ptg

Data Center Energy Efficiency Process Steps
The first step was to evaluate and analyze energy use at the customer’s data
centers. The evaluation or diagnose step should be the first step in moving
toward green IT. This case study is structured around the five process steps
(the “wagon wheel”) first described in detail in Chapter 2, “The Basics of
Green IT.” It should be noted that although the steps are numbered, the
steps are often carried out at the same time or in somewhat different order,
although the diagnose step should always be the first step.

Step 1. Diagnose
This is the first step. The IBM Project Big Green team was brought in to
help kick off the diagnose step with the customer and IBM support team. IT
vendors can bring their experience with other customer data centers (and
their own data centers) and review best practices and lessons learned. Often
this review of experience with other data centers for green IT is presented
without financial cost.
There are currently three data centers for this energy utility: the main data
center and two smaller data centers. The case study information is based on
the main data center. The two smaller data centers will take advantage of the
energy-efficiency best practices determined for the main data center.