This week we will continue our study of Business/IS strategy and planning, using theEuropean Union and Australian Government's use of ICT as an example. The same principles and practices can be applied to companies as well as government agencies.
The Australian Minister for Finance, released a Review of the Australian Government's Use of Information and Communication Technology (known as "The Gershon review"), 16 October 2008. The Gershon review provides high level proposals of how ICT operations should be managed in a large organisation and recommends the consolidation of data centres. The European Commission issued a Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for data centre energy efficiency (30 October 2008). The EU Guidelines provide a detailed approach to implementing and assessing the implementation of proposals.
Sir Peter Gershon carried out a review of Australian government ICT, including data centres. This provides a useful overview of ICT planning for a large organisation. Sustainability of ICT is covered in Recommendation 7 of the report. However, many other sections of the report are relevant to planning for sustainability.
The Gershon review of the Australian Government's use of information and communication technology (ICT) employed an evidence-based approach, first assessing the current situation, to determine the scope and possible areas for improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.
The review identified the seven key findings:
It should be noted that only the last of these findings "Sustainability agenda", mentions green ICT explicitly. However, they all have an effect on the ability of an organisation to incorporate sustainability in its planning. The report's primary finding was that the autonomy of the individual government agencies were the problem.
The recommendations correspond to the key findings:
Most of these recommendations effect the ability to increase the sustainability of of ICT in the organisation. Stronger governance arrangements should make it more feasible to have Green ICT included in the business planning and reporting.
A reduction in the "business-as-usual" budget would allow for initiatives in energy saving. Enhanced skills base would allow for green ICT training. Consolidated data centres would allow for more energy efficient cooling and power management practices. A more effective marketplace would allow suppliers to offer more innovative approaches to energy reduction and materials reuse.
One problem with the recommendations is the proposal to keep agencies' ICT equipment and databases in separately controlled and managed areas. This would limit the ability to share computer servers between agencies, thus reducing the amount of hardware needed and allowing it to operate at a more power efficient higher level of utilisation. The use of virtualisation, where hardware is physically shared, but logically partitioned, may be an acceptable. Also not covered by the report is the use of shared web based applications, where agencies can use the same applications, running on the same shared servers, but have only their own data presented to them via a web interface.
The issue of the dominance of large suppliers. is an issue for Green ICT. Implementing particular approaches to sustainability will be difficult , if these are not supported by the main suppliers. However, the report does not address the use of standards and open source design as a way to avoid vendor lock in. This is particularly useful for Green ICT with the use of formal standards and industry sponsored labelling of equipment and software.
The sustainability recommendation is discussed in detail below.
The last recommendation of the report, Recommendation 7, deals with Sustainability of ICT. This is intended to address Key Finding 7, which was a disconnect between the Government's sustainability agenda and its ability to implement this for ICT. The report concentrates on management of energy costs and the carbon footprint of ICT. Other aspects of sustainability, such of materials use, toxic waste disposal and the use of ICT to reduce energy use in other processes is not addressed.
Only 23 out of 72 agencies indicated they had an energy plan, of these, 13 included an ICT energy component in the plan. Only six agencies provided meaningful ICT energy use data. In reponse to this a whole-of-government ICT sustainability plan, in conjunction with the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA), to manage the carbon footprint of the Government's ICT activities was proposed.
For agencies which provided responses on ICT energy, consumption increased by 3%, from 162.4 gigawatts in 2006-07 to 167.6 gigawatts in 2007-08. But in the same period ICT energy costs increased 16%, from $18.1 million in 2006-07 to $21.0 million in 2007-08. This would suggest that cost of energy could be a significant incentive for agencies to introduce energy saving measures.
The whole-of-government ICT sustainability plan was to be developed by Dec 2009 (not released as of June 2010). The aim was to contribute to the government's overall agenda to manage carbon emissions, and reduced rate of growth in energy costs. It should be noted that this is not a very ambitious goal, as other industry plans for an absolute reduction in energy use by ICT, rather than just a reduced rate of increase. Agencies were to each develop their own ICT energy efficiency plans, by March 2010 (not released as of June 2010). The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), was to develop a Green ICT Procurement Kit by December 2009 (not released as of June 2010).
The whole-of-government ICT sustainability plan would adopt standards, such as EPEAT, as mandatory for ICT acquisitions. A whole-of-government ICT energy target would be set, with agencies reporting progress. This would be designed to work with the government's carbon pollution reduction scheme.
In addition large agencies (spending more than $20M a year on ICT) would each develop an ICT energy efficiency plan. Agencies would at least measure their data centre energy efficiency and plan a target energy usage. The plans would be assessed by DEWHA, with reports consistent with the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Framework.
It should be noted that unlike the funding recommendations where a 15% reduction as proposed, no firm targets for energy use were proposed in the report.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, issued version 1 of a European Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency and Best Practice Guidelines, in 30 October 2008. These are intended to reduce, and assess the reduction, in the energy consumption in data centres. The Code of Conduct is voluntary.
The code of conduct argues that data centres have typically been designed with large tolerances for operational and capacity changes and this results in power consumption inefficiency. Only a small fraction of the power consumed by the data centre is actually used by the IT systems, most is used up by redundant power and cooling systems.
The Code of Conduct considers the data centre as a complete system, to optimise the IT system and the infrastructure together as 'facility efficiency'.
The code defines one metric:
Data centre infrastructure efficiency (DCiE):
DCiE = (Main IT equipment energy consumption)/(Total facility energy consumption) * 100
A higher figure indicates better energy efficiency. A measure of 50% would indicate half the energy consumed by the data centre was used by the IT systems (a typical figure for existing centres). A theoretical figure of 100% would indicate that all the energy consumed by the data centre was used for IT (unlikely to be achieved).
Further metrics are under development:
IT productivity metric: An indicator of how efficiently the IT equipment provides useful IT services. This requires some measure of output of the centre, such as number of standard tractions performed, per unit of energy.
Total energy productivity metric: Relating the useful IT services to the total energy consumption of facility.
The Best Practice Guidelines are a companion to the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centres to assist with measures to improve the energy efficiency
A subset of the best practices are are defined as the expected minimum level of energy saving activity. These are the easiest techniques to apply to an existing data centre. Some practices are categorised as applying to New Software, Expected during any new software install or upgrade, for New IT Equipment, Expected for new or replacement IT equipment, During retrofit. Numeric values, indicating the effect of the measure are included.
Data Centre Utilisation, Management and Planning
The first measure covers management of a data centre:
Group involvement: Establish an approval board containing representatives from all disciplines (software, IT, M&E). Require the approval of this group for any significant decision to ensure that the impacts of the decision have been properly understood and an effective solution reached. For example, this could include the definition of standard IT hardware lists through considering the M&E implications of different types of hardware. This group could be seen as the functional equivalent of a change board. Expected: Yes. Value: 3
Embedded energy is then considered:
Consider the embedded energy in devices: Carry out an audit of existing equipment to maximise any unused existing capability by ensuring that all areas of optimisation, consolidation and aggregation are identified prior to new material investment. Expected: Yes. Value: 2
Matching resilience to business requirements is then recommended:
Build resilience to business requirements: Only the level of resilience actually justified by business requirements and impact analysis should be built. 2N infrastructures are frequently unnecessary and inappropriate. Resilience for a small portion of critical services can be obtained using DR / BC sites. Expected: During retrofit. Value: 3
Consider multiple levels of resilience: It is possible to build a single data centre to provide multiple levels of power and cooling resilience to different floor areas. Many co-location providers already deliver this, for example, optional 'grey' power feeds without UPS or generator back up. Expected: During retrofit. Value: 3
Lean provisioning of power and cooling for a maximum of 18 months of data floor capacity: The provisioning of excess power and cooling capacity in the data centre drives substantial fixed losses and is unnecessary. Planning a data centre for modular (scalable) expansion and then building out this capacity in a rolling program of deployments is more efficient. This also allows the technology 'generation' of the IT equipment and supporting M&E infrastructure to be matched, improving both efficiency and the ability to respond to business requirements. Expected: During retrofit. Value: 3
The provisioning recommendations then go into increasing levels of technical detail.
In purchasing new IT equipment, it is recommended that energy efficiency be considered (this assumes the data centre and the equipment in it are run by the one entity):
Multiple tender for IT hardware - Power: Include the Energy efficiency performance of the IT device as a high priority decision factor in the tender process. This may be through the use of Energy Star or SPECPower type standard metrics or through application or deployment specific user metrics more closely aligned to the target environment which may include service level or reliability components. The power consumption of the device at the expected utilisation or applied workload should be considered in addition to peak performance per Watt figures.
Multiple tender for IT hardware - Basic operating temperature and humidity range: Include the operating temperature and humidity ranges of new equipment as high priority decision factors in the tender process. The minimum range, at the air intake to servers, is 18-27C and 5.5C dew point up to 15C dew point & 60% RH. The current relevant standard is the ASHRAE Recommended range for Class 1 Data Centers as described by ASHRAE in '2008 ASHRAE Environmental Guidelines for Datacom Equipment'.
McKinsey & Company in "Revolutionizing Data Centre Efficiency" (J.M. Kaplan, W Forrest, N. Kindler, July 2008) recommend the appointment of an Energy Czar and transferring financial accountability of data center assets from Corporate Real Estate to the CIO. These recommendations are driven by an economic analysis which concludes that ongoing server proliferation is resulting in far more expense power and cooling costs which must crowd out other IT initiatives unless IT gets a bigger slice of corporate revenue.
Some of the report's findings: