Greening the Datacentre - Part 1

The moment Prime Minister Kevin Rudd signed the Kyoto Treaty and soon after establishing the Department of Climate Change, it signaled that all industry in Australia including Information Technology had to do its bit to address global warming challenge.

1st July 2008 marks the beginning of mandatory reporting of Greenhouse Gas emissions for corporations that:

• emit > 125 kilotonnes of greenhouse gases or produce/use > 500 terajoules of energy each year; or
• have operational control of facilities that emit > 25 kilotonnes of greenhouse gases or use/produce > 100 terajoules of energy per year
  

Lower thresholds will be phased in by 2010-11 which is expected to cover around 700 medium and large corporations in Australia. Source: NGERS Overview Fact Sheet

This has data centre operators and managers thinking about how consolidation of hardware can “cool” their data centre by lowering the power consumption via a reduction of hardware usage, which in turn requires less floor space, cooling etc.

However consolidation must go beyond virtualisation of hardware and move toward addressing the duplication of data, processes and business applications. The first step Hardware and Data centre consolidation is both obvious and easy, as incremental increases disk and CPU utilisation - through consolidation and virtualisation – will ultimately reduce your carbon footprint. However exponential benefits are achieved when a broader IT consolidation occurs to remove the duplication of:

Data – via database consolidation, data compression, data normalisation and de-duplication and ultimately Master Data Management and databases of record (dBOR)

Process - can be split into 2 logical areas

• Operational – reducing and eliminating redundant processes around the management of application data and operations such as HA, DR, backup and recovery

• Business – Rationalise duplicate business system process and automate as many manual processes as possible.

Application – to rationalise and de-commission legacy applications through the standardisation of business functions, potentially delivered through shared service functions.

Whilst I have not collected empirical evidence, my view is that addressing Data, Process and Application consolidation will significantly reduce Greenhouse emissions beyond just hardware consolidation and virtualisation and furthermore provides greater financial benefit.