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

anywhere is a big waste of resources. How much does it save a shipper to
turn around his cargo in port eight hours faster? He might know the
dollar amount down to the penny, but there is a CO2 emissions savings
per hour saved as well. FedEx planes warming their engines, waiting for
documentation, are burning fuel. So are trucks running their engines as
they wait in line to cross borders while custom officials thumb through
paperwork.
So far, we have discussed only the service end of the business. The true cost
of transportation includes the paper production, delivery, storage in more
paper boxes and binders, incineration, and landfill of old documents. That’s
the big picture as we hop onto the 21st-century Silk Road. Product end of
®
life is becoming a significant factor in green IT. Cisco and most IT manu-
facturers have processes to reduce the environmental impacts associated with
IT products throughout their entire life-cycle, from product development,
manufacturing, use, service, and eventual product end of life. This is
described at this Cisco Web site: http://www.cisco.com/web/ordering/
ciscocapital/refurbished/green_it.html.

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Important Steps for Green IT

In moving to green IT, first set up the measurement and monitoring
process. It is important to first “baseline” the energy use at your data
centers. The mantra in implementing green IT and green data centers is
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
As we’ve seen, data centers provide a huge opportunity for saving
energy. Data centers consume more energy per square foot than any other
part of an office building. But they’re part of an information and services
supply chain that begins with raw materials and ends with the disposal
of waste. The chain includes people, the space they occupy, and the cars
they drive. Along the way, the chain increasingly gobbles energy and
spews out greenhouse gases.
The IT department is in a unique position to change that. The place
to start is with the data center. Energy consumption in the data center is
predominantly from two loads: servers and cooling. Figure 2.1 shows the
process used by IBM for creating energy-efficient green data centers.
This is a general five-step process that IBM has continued to refine for
data centers. The green data center tasks of measuring, cooling, and vir-
tualizing are included in the green IT steps described in Chapter 1, “The
Importance of Green IT.”