By now, everyone knows the value of businesses going green: You save the planet, and gain a public relations benefit to boot. But while large enterprises have the funds to dig in deep, embracing the measures experts deem necessary to go green, smaller companies often don’t have the money or time to make the same commitment.So how can a small or midsized company move toward a greener
environment without breaking the bank? We’ll detail the top five ways your
company can become greener without too much pain, but before putting any of
them in action, it’s critical to know how much you’re actually spending now—and
in what parts of the business—on energy. That means collecting and reading
power bill information at a company level, site level, departmental level and
data center level. A more advanced approach is to collect power use by groups
of devices and associate it with applications, but that involves installing
special reporting or analytics software. These types of software, such as BLS
Footprint Tracker or EnergyCAP, help track energy use and carbon footprint in a
more sophisticated way, explained Andy Lawrence, research director for
eco-efficient IT at The 451 Group in London.
By getting a handle on that information, you’ll know what areas
are ripe for change. And when you make those changes, the power budget can be
reduced by 20 to as much as 50%, Lawrence added.
Once you have your baseline, it’s time to start making changes.
Here are the top five changes small and midsized businesses can make, in order
of cost (lowest cost first):
1. Recycling. It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s green.
The Business Gateway Initiative, a partnership of 21 federal agencies, is
promoting take-back programs, a form of business recycling, which makes
manufacturers responsible for accepting products or packaging back from
businesses at the end of their useful lives. Participating manufacturers
include Xerox, HP, IBM, Apple, Dell, Sony, Xerox and Nortel Networks. For a complete
list, visit www.business.gov. And if
your company is a manufacturing organization, commit to being green by using
materials that can be recycled more easily by being easily dismantled, avoiding
excess packaging, and collecting and reusing packaging, said Martin Hingley, an
analyst with IDC.
2. Reduce heating and cooling costs. Here is where
your up-front measurements come in handy. If you can afford it, consider
replacing aging heating and cooling systems, and agree to turn up the
temperature a degree or two. Other measures, like reducing the number of
servers through virtualization and replacing older equipment with newer, more
energy-equipment, also will reduce heating and cooling costs.
3. Control desktop power management. These
automated systems will turn all of your company’s PCs off at the hour you
specify using central policies and turn them back on at a certain time the next
day. The software also can be set up to go into standby for longer periods,
such as when an employee is not at his desk for a few hours, and is
sophisticated enough to bring a unit up for an upgrade or patch during the
night and then power it down again. “This is one of the easiest and quickest
wins when it comes to going green, and the ROI is less than a year” Lawrence
said. Examples include 1E’s NightWatchman, Verdiem’s Surveyor and BigFix.
4. Virtualization. Servers tend to run at 75% or higher
of maximum power consumption even when idle, and every watt used by a server
usually requires about the same in cooling, Lawrence said. Therefore it’s
essential that servers that aren’t being used are eliminated, which lends
itself to virtualization. Although not cheap to implement, virtualization, by
its very definition, reduces energy consumption, increasing your score on the
green scorecard. For example, VMware, the largest virtualization player by far,
estimates that by implementing its technology, companies can reduce power
consumption and cost by 80 to 90%. The company claims that for every server
virtualized, customers can save about 7,000 kilowatt hours, or four tons of CO2
emissions, every year. It also claims that PCs virtualized and hosted on
servers can reduce power consumption and cost by 35%.
5. Replace aging servers and PCs. The servers today
are considerably more energy-efficient than the servers of even two or three
years ago—about 400% more from 2005 to 2008, in terms of performance per watt,
Lawrence said. But do the math before you replace them; only can it be an
expensive undertaking, but it’s not always the best idea from a carbon
footprint point of view because all goods have an embedded carbon footprint in
what it takes to manufacture them. In the case of a PC, at least half of the
carbon footprint is in its manufacturing, Lawrence notes. If you do decide
replacement is in order, the choice is between simply upgrading to newer
servers, which are much more energy-efficient than older servers, or specifying
energy-efficient servers, which cost more but save more energy.
To help justify the ROI of some of these changes, check out the
incentives offered by utility companies in your area. For example, Silicon
Valley Power offers rebates of up to 80% of the project cost for companies that
implement server virtualization projects that result in the removal of
computers and servers, while Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) offers a
flat rebate of $158 per server consolidated through virtualization. San Diego
Gas & Electric offers several programs to help small and midsized companies
specifically improve their energy efficiency, while businesses served by Avista
Utilities of Spokane, Wash., can get up to $15,000 toward an efficiency study
to identify savings. For a more comprehensive list, consult the Database of
State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE) (dsireusa.org).
And once you have
implemented any or all of these changes, don’t forget to re-measure your energy
use, Lawrence said. “Have targets, and monitor your Green IT score,” he said.
