An easy pick?

As the public sector aims to meet targets on reducing carbon emissions, addressing the environmental issues around data centres might appear to be a low hanging fruit. According to the Carbon Trust they account for a quarter of IT related emissions, which in turn make up 2% of the world's total carbon emissions. But reducing this would not be easy. Greenpeace reports that globally, at current growth rates, data centres and telecommunication networks will triple their current consumption by 2020 to more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. Debate rages on issues such as reporting and measuring power usage and carbon emissions in data centres, cooling and building technologies, offshoring and outsourcing, and ICT staff are under increasing pressure to get up to speed with the nuances of data centre environmental considerations. The UK government's Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme offers a financial incentive for organisations to improve their energy efficiency, but service providers argue that the scheme is flawed in relation to data centres as it measures power use rather than efficiency. Soon after the CRC scheme was launched, an agreement was pushed through by the US industry consortium Green Grid, and backed by the European Union Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency, to use power usage effectiveness (PUE) to measure the energy efficiency of data centres. PUE divides the total energy consumed by a data centre by the amount of energy used to power the IT equipment. But there are no standard approaches to calculating carbon emissions and few benchmarks or monitoring techniques, and this makes it difficult to measure progress. Bracknell Forest BC believes it was the first UK local authority to be awarded 'Participant' status to the European code of conduct for data centre energy efficiency. Richard Dawson, the council's IT services manager, says this is a good way to demonstrate green credentials inside and outside the organisation, and that he found the process straightforward. "We asked our supplier Futuretech if it could get the council through the EU code of conduct and they said yes," he says. "We did it in about a day, filled in all the paperwork and did all the calculations, and because we have a green data centre we flew through and we were the first on the list so we are quite proud." The council achieved this with some retrofitting. "A lot of people are going to be constrained by what they have got, so we were lucky to have a fairly new data centre. It meant we could apply some things very cheaply and very effectively to it. "You can fit things to your existing data centre to make them comply. The metering is a very cheap option, the cold air containment system only cost £14,000 and that has got a payback over two years with the money saved on the air conditioning." He adds: "If I had my time again I would move the data centre and put it next to the sports centre because I could use the waste heat. We could use the waste heat now, but it would be quite expensive to try to retrofit it into this building." Suffolk CC has also made a significant effort. Its strategic plan is 'to make Suffolk the greenest county', so it has had to look hard at its data centres. The council has a 10 year partnership with BT Customer Services Direct (CSD), set up in 2004, to provide shared services for the county and Mid Suffolk DC. Mark Adams Wright, Suffolk's head of strategic ICT and customer service, says: "We are talking about the future regularly and how it is going to look. We need to embrace cloud computing and software as a service at a future point." A virtualisation project planned to deliver significant energy cost savings is under way. Virtualisation and the environmental issues surrounding data centres were not on the radar when the councils signed on the dotted line with BT six years ago, so there have had to be some adjustments within the contract. Goy Roper, head of ICT for BT's CSD, says: "The interesting part of the relationship is that CSD is a commercial organisation; we are here to make some money at the end of the day as well as provide council services, and therefore there has to be good business reasons why we take these decisions." CSD was contracted to refresh the ICT throughout the contract's duration, and could have simply kept on replacing one server with another to meet its obligations; but the agreement was tweaked to provide for virtualisation. "All of the accommodation that we occupy as CSD is provided by the council, run by the council's property team, including the data centres. The council pays the electricity bills," points out Roper. "Therefore, when you start to put a traditional virtualisation business case together, as CSD on our own it doesn't really stack up." In the end, both CSD and Suffolk CC invested money into the project and shared a different set of benefits. "We make cost savings in terms of server hardware and server maintenance and the council makes large savings on electricity and meets its green requirements," says Roper. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is also experimenting with new models, working with the National Grid to share the benefits of intelligent air conditioning in data centres. The National Grid spends about £1bn a year to make sure it is in balance, and there are about 15 coal powered stations monitoring the health of the grid. RLTec, with the help of a Carbon Trust Grant for £160,000, is trialling a system in the air conditioning units used in Defra data centres. By detecting the state of the grid supply as it comes under stress from higher demand, the air conditioning will reduce and when the peak demand is over the cooling can then resume. Bob Crooks, Defra's Green ICT programme leader, says: "By avoiding the costs of meeting that peak demand, the National Grid is able to provide a return to RLTec, and its approach is to look at passing on some of that as a revenue stream for participating customers. It is a new area for us and we are anxious to see what can be gained from this for UK power demand." He urges everyone to start to grapple with energy footprints and understanding energy and carbon emissions as part of their financial accounting: "Understanding the positioning of data centres within that is going to be a learning process, and there is a lot of concern that the easy way out to reduce your footprint is to offshore your data centres." Tony Bezuidenhout, chief information and technology officer at crime reduction charity Nacro, is very much grappling with data centre energy issues right now. Nacro went for a one year co-location contract with UK Solutions as part of a move to update its ICT: "The green aspect was very important – we bought blade servers and storage area network servers – all the latest technologies," says Bezuidenhout. Yet the technologies have so far not delivered on expectations. "For example, the blade servers are meant to be very energy efficient. UKS provides us with monitoring of power used in our racks. As we added one in live we could then see it uses one amp of power. That was very surprising as a traditional server uses one amp power as well." Bezuidenhout also virtualised the servers, but performance issues have confined them to testing and traditional servers have been brought back in. "We have gigabit fibre backbone, really top end kit, but we are not getting the green results," he says. "The technology is all leading edge, but it is not working that well for us at the moment. I need to establish is it our fault or is it manufacturer integration issues. What is it?" Deeper analysis of the environmental impact of data centres, more granular measurement of power efficiency and a healthy dose of pragmatism should enable the public sector to reduce the environmental impact of its data centres. But there is no doubt that there is lots of work to be done. This article appeared in the June issue of GC magazine.