Green ITSM

Editor's Notes

• #3 About a year ago, the LIG chapter had asked us to provide a presentation on Green IT, sounds simple enough. Before writing this presentation I started with a quick Google search to get a general feeling for the level of awareness around this topic and came up with a manageable 1.5 million results. A few weeks later I had some travel planned, nothing much out of the ordinary, except that car that was booked was a Prius and in the terminal I saw about five different environmentally focused technology advertisements. Think for a minute, what was the last touch point you had with a product or promotion that was Green? My guess is the answer was probably sometime this morning. The green movement is happening and whether we are ready or not it has crept into IT. Today I’ll discuss why this is happening now, what it means when we say “Green IT”, how you’re going to be affected and what you can do.
• #4 Before I get any further, I want to take a minute and discuss for the scope of this presentation what I consider to fall under Green IT. Using a Wikipedia definition, Green computing or Green IT is, “the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems… efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment”. This broad definition covers everything from efficient cooling towers and variable speed blowers to the use of virtualization and power management on your laptops. And the underlying goals of a green approach to IT are the same as any other green endeavors; reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximize energy efficiency and promote the recyclability of products.
• #5 So why is this happening now? One of the main contributing factors in the Green IT equation is the growth of datacenters. Data centers are increasing rapidly and sucking up more power daily. According to the EPA, the energy use of the nation’s servers and data centers doubled from 2000 to 2006… under current efficiency trends, national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double again by 2011. Add in IDC’s prediction that by the end of 2010, for every $1 spent on hardware, 70 cents will be spend on power and cooling. By 2012, for every $1 spend on hardware, $1 will be spend on power and cooling we can clearly see the rapid growth.
• #6 This tremendous datacenter subsequent increase in power consumption is related to changes in the way we operate. Who here uses Facebook? Great, now who was using facebook three years ago? More people are using online financial services, internet communications, shopping, etc. More business are using online records, shipping and tracking, etc. For a long period of time Facebook was quoted as saying they had 10,000 servers. According to Jeff Rothschild, Facebook VP of technology, today they have “somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 servers,” and he says that the number ”will be different today than it was yesterday” because Facebook is adding capacity on a daily basis.
• #7 According to Info-Tech’s Green Index, One-quarter of IT leaders in the US are either “very” or “extremely” concerned about energy efficiency and environmental responsibility, yet only nine percent consider themselves to be “very” or “extremely” green.” Then consider Gartner’s Data Center polling, 20% of those surveyed in 2007 consider Green IT to be of high interest and in 2009 it doubled to 40% who considered Green IT to be of high interested. And finally, Gartner’s prediction for 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs. Meaning enterprises may soon be penalized for excess greenhouse gas emissions.
• #8 Momentum for Green IT initiatives typically comes from one of three camps. Most likely, greenness comes from a company’s corporate initiatives, which is the best case scenario. As I’ll discuss in a moment, executive support is crucial to effectively implementing a green IT approach. Companies are using green as a differentiator and using green programs to support their Corporate Social Responsibility. Depending on your company’s industry, government regulation may affect how your organization does business. In 2007, former president Bush signed an executive order that government agencies use green technology and processes, if corporations want to sell to the federal government they now must have a green plan. A third tipping factors for an organization to consider Green IT approaches are datacenter power constraints. One of the largest concentration of datacenter power in the world stretches from London’s Heathrow to Canary Wharf; and it is a well-known tale that the area is running dangerously short of electricity. After talking to the former Global IT Operations for Deutsche Bank, he said that It wouldn’t be uncommon to have a datacenter only one third full physically but without enough power to fill it. Many companies with data centers in London are anticipating the demand for power for the 2012 Olympics and have started to buy power before they need it.The London case is extreme, but not unique. In almost every major city, there are some localized issues regarding power supply. Cities such as Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Paris, for example, all face some shortages and infrastructure problems in certain districts. Gartner predicts that the cost of supplying energy to a server over its three-year lifetime will soon exceed the server’s acquisition costs
• #9 If you haven’t noticed a trend in the past few slides, I’ll state the obvious. The datacenter is the easiest and most logical starting point for greening the IT organization. Considering IT as a whole, the data center is the piece of the equation that is directly related to carbon emission and consumes the majority of the energy. In addition, it is becoming more and more expensive to own and run a datacenter. In 2008, Gartner correctly predicated that by 2009, power and cooling costs would be second only to salaries in many IT budgets.
• #10 From within the datacenter, one of the best candidates to reduce energy consumption is the servers. The typical datacenter has grown from dozens of separate physical servers to hundreds and even thousands. Purchasing operating and maintaining all these servers became very expensive. With virtualization, operations can combine several of these smaller servers on to one box, basically taking care of one big house instead of ten smaller ones.Virtualizationinvolves decoupling a workload and its data from the functional details of the physical platform on which it is hosted. Virtualization providesbetter economies of scale and allows workloads can be matched with physical resources for more flexible and efficient management.
• #11 I’ll mention the next few points briefly just to provide an idea of some of the infrastructure and operational approaches that you can use if you manage your own datacenter. Server consolidation implies combining workloads from separate machines or applications into a smaller number of systems or applications.Remember the decrease in power consumption is not the only benefit, by consolidating servers you have also reduced the power needed to cool the server. Consider replacingrack mounted servers with blade servers which take advantage of share resources such as power, fans, networking and storage. Blades require 10 percent and 25 percent less cooling and power for the same computing capacity. Improve the method of cooling your datacenter – The way we cool a datacenter hasn’t really changed much over the years. The basic idea is to get a large air conditioner and bring in a lot of power to run it. Doesn’t it seem a bit wasteful to keep an entire room at 60 degrees if you only really need that cool air right at the source of it, the servers? Consider adopting in row cooling units which focus the cool air at the source, where it is needed. In addition, be sure your server room is properly sealed and that air flow is optimized. Evaluate cloud computing where possible, it is an ideal alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users’ applications. And finally, for the best effect combine a few of these approaches. Using virtualization with blade servers is a great way to provide even more significant higher density computing and reduction on energy consumption and space conservation
• #12 While significant impacts will be seen from the datacenter side, some of the most impactful application of greening an organization happen on your desk. “The EPA estimates that providing all computers in the US with sleep modes reduce their energy use by 60 percent to 70 percent – and ultimately saves enough electric each year to power Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine; cut electricity bills by $2 billion; and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of 5 million cars.” A screen saver doesn’t actually save energy; while it may save the phosphors in your monitor this isn’t really a concern with newer LCD screens. A screen saver that displays moving images causes your monitor to consume as much electricity as it does when in active use.Other areas for improvement include offering telecommuting and online meetings.Green is more than just a datacenter,Electronic-polling results gathered at Gartner's 2009 Data Center Conference show that green IT initiatives continue to be important to data center managers. Initiatives other than those dealing with power and cooling efficiency now exceed 50% of the responses. Green IT Initiatives Are Moving Beyond Power and Cooling Efficiencies 8 February 201
• #13 There are certainly a few opinions about whether or not ITIL incorporates green initiatives. While at the surface the ITIL V3 update does not explicitly incorporate environmental factors, the ITIL framework does provide an adaptable method for making use of existing processes to deliver sustainable IT today, according to Capgemini.The ITIL framework allows environmental targets to be built into new and existing services through its lifecycle phases of strategy, design, transition, operation and continuous service improvement. And since ITIL v3 places great emphasis on the services delivered to the business, it could be extrapolated that any IT services that does not contribute to the business would be carbon overhead should therefore be eliminated.
• #14 While not directly related to ITIL, IT governance and a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility certainly impacts how green initiatives are incorporated into a company’s ITIL disciplines. IT Governance is subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. IT governance acts as the decision authority and empowers Service Management with the decision rights to carry out the delivery of IT in a more sustainable way. IT Governance help to reach strategic outcomes including environmental targets.Corporate Social Responsibility is typically a self-regulating mechanism whereby business would monitor and ensure its support to law, ethical standards, and international norms. The ITIL framework provides a good reporting mechanism to capture performance data that can be fed back to executives in the form of a balanced scorecard.A balanced CSR was originated to help give managers and executives a more 'balanced' view of organizational performance by adding strategic non-financial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to a performance measurement framework.
• #15 Service portfolio management is a key candidate for helping to reduce the environmental impact of IT services. Environmental targets are ideally suited as inputs for service portfolio when provisioning new, more sustainable, IT services. Managers can assess predicted performance targets against environmental policies before agreeing to a new service.Service Level Management include environmental service capacity requirements in new and existing SLA’s. How? Very important to set in place a joint CSR policy with outsourced partners.Negotiations with customers should be guided by CSR policy, evolve the process of defining and agreeing to SLA’s based solely on “business impact” and “price” to incorporating environmental impact of a service.IT services usually operate over the entire work week even though most works only use the service M-F.While providing service 100% of the time may satisfy the business and be an acceptable cost, it may be unacceptable from a environmental perspective. Corporate culture will always play a part on these discussions and it will fall within SLM to negotiate this decision with CSR considerations of course.If an organization wishes to actively discourage energy waste, SLM process could incorporate financial measures for idle services (requires senior mgmt support) with global orgs this is may be evener rarer as services are frequently required to operate on a 24X7 basis
• #16 Incident management provides the opportunity to assess the environmental impact of IT service recovery. How? Incorporate environmental targets in your current performance indicators.You can measure the environmental impact of an incident with a high or low impact score;assign a carbon score to each resolution category – be sure to incorporate current service delivery model.You need to ask, if the organization uses outsourced remote support, if site visits are required, and if there are internal support resources based on-site. The goal is to establish a baseline that can then be measured, monitored and improved1- industrialized, mutualized off shore centers resolving application incidents remotely5-long distance travel for site visits, replacement equipment containing high level of environmentally unfriendly materials
• #17 Consider the environmental impact of RFC’s before they take place. Incorporate environmental concernson a request for change and award a score to the RFC based on impact and compliance with CSR. Develop a scoring mechanism to help rank the change for positive and negative compliance. Accepting or rejecting an RFC now uses a rationale that includes environmental impact as well as financial, business and technology. Close the loop by feeding change reports into the continual service process improvement. Over time the reporting helps to analyze and hopefully reduce impact and align services with the CSR targets.
• #18 Additional application of Green ITIL include:Mapping CI’s to existing services helps to identify what equipment is mission critical. Managers can then focus on what components add the most value and what is overhead.The next step is to look at the items that are not mapped to a business service and determine if they are needed.Configurationand asset management – important role to play because it controls the information about the components, should include information on energy labels such as Energy star rated Capacity management helps to plan how IT introduces capacity; it is an ideal candidate to incorporate CSR policy initiatives and environmental concerns – encourage reduced consumption, reuse and recycling. To make this work IT must have strong forecasting capability and well understand future capacity needs.
• #19 The basic green IT strategy for any organization is based on the goal of reducing IT energy consumption throughout the business. To reach this goal an organizations need to be able to track and measure energy consumption. As we discussed, the ITIL framework provides a good starting point. However, this discussion assumed that an organization could implement ITIL processes quickly and rapidly adapt to changes which is not always the case. Things are changing and they are changing fast,by 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets. Cloud computing solutions for infrastructure, HR and ITSM take advantage of economies of scale to deliver flexible, cheaper solutions than traditional client server models.But simply passing the ball to the vendor is not enough. For cloud computing to be truly green,the company’s servers need to be doing more work than they would be doing if not in a cloud infrastructure. Without utilization data per unit and other datacenter efficiency measures it is not possible to know just how efficient cloud computing actually is.
• #20 Going green is not an easy task or decision to make. Before embarking on an green initiative consider the organization, its culture and the stakeholders. Organizational behavior is mapped by policy and culture – to help with change new policies should be introduced, for example a new travel policy that has stricter control on the frequency and justification for travel.It is the people in each step of the SM lifecycle that must be aware of the environmental policy and targets for the measures to be implemented.Key factors for successjoint CSR policy with all stakeholders involved in IT delivery, ensures negotiations and conversations have a shared framework and shared goal.Before beginning anything consider the maturity level of your company, your IT department and how change will be received.