How Green Is Your IT?

For Andrew Griffith, CFO of British Sky Broadcasting, the £4.5 billion (€5.7 billion) FTSE 100 media company 39% owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, giving the green light to a new data centre wasn't as straightforward at it once was. Although the need for additional data storage capacity was a strong indication of Sky's promising growth trajectory, building a high-end, electricity-greedy data centre would ramp up its carbon emissions — something Griffith couldn't countenance. As part of the Bigger Picture — Sky's corporate social responsibility programme — the company had committed itself to reducing CO₂ emissions by 10% from 2003 levels to 51,032 tonnes by 2010. "We've been reducing our environmental impact since 2002," says Griffith. "In fact, we've cut our carbon emissions by 27% in the last three years alone. We do this because it's the right thing to do — we share our customers' concerns about the urgent need to address climate change."

The programme puts the idea of green IT centre stage. In aiming to slash its energy consumption, Sky sees its IT operations as playing an important role in the effort. Given that the IT industry as a whole is responsible for 2% of global CO₂ emissions — the same amount as the aviation industry — that makes a lot of sense.

Sky is not alone. A growing number of companies are drawing up green initiatives for procuring, operating and disposing of IT assets and processes, say tech experts at Forrester Research, which predicts that corporate spending on green IT services will increase to €3 billion in 2013 from €320m today.

This is all good news for CFOs. With environmental awareness at an all-time high, Phill Everson, a partner with Deloitte, says, "the green agenda is another lever that the CFO can use to get the efficiency he or she demands." It's also a way of getting the subject of IT infrastructure onto the boardroom agenda.

Centre of Attention
Companies are addressing green IT in a number of ways. Some have an arsenal of initiatives to roll out new environmentally friendly desktop tools (see "The Eco Itinerary" at the end of this article), often enlisting the services of third parties for help with specific office equipment, such as printers and photo copiers. (See "Effort of Duplication.") But the area where companies like Sky reckon green IT initiatives can make the greatest impact — and where most vendors are focusing their efforts (see "What's on the Market?") — is in their data centres.

This is an obvious choice given how data centres have mushroomed. Business growth demands more IT equipment, and with hardware prices falling over recent years companies have been cramming more servers into their data centres. Now they are running out of space, and building new centres demands huge capital expenditure. What's more, the annual cost of running a server is now higher than the server itself. Adding to the problem, servers running a single application often sit on standby for much of the time, consuming electricity while doing nothing. Amid rising energy costs, that's costing companies too much. "Nothing hurts a company more than when it feels its cost base going up," says Clive Longbottom, an analyst with Quocirca, an IT research firm and consultancy.

As a result, writes Christopher Mines of Forrester in a report published in March, "When we say green IT, most [of our] clients hear 'data-centre efficiency.' It's top of mind for most clients because problems like growth or power capacity limits, and returns like energy cost savings, are highly tangible."

As Sky's Griffith puts it, "If IT infrastructure changes are well planned and well managed, you can cut CO₂ and your overheads." Good planning and management, in fact, led Sky to decide that it didn't need to build a new, high-end data centre after all. Rather, its 14 centres are being consolidated into two, one in Chilworth, England and one in Schiphol, the Netherlands.

Matthew McDonald, head of Sky's centralised technology services, says the convergence of three factors enabled the consolidation: server virtualisation, which allows several applications to run on a single server simultaneously; blade architecture, whereby several stripped-down servers are housed in a single cooling, storage and connectivity system; and right-sizing, ensuring that IT equipment is only as big and powerful as it needs to be.

So far, the consolidation under Sky's programme has delivered an annual reduction of 563.5 carbon tonnes. A key to that success, says McDonald, has been the close work between the facilities and IT teams to ensure the technology changes designed to reduce energy consumption were properly implemented. Executive-level sponsorship of the project has also been important. "Sky's Bigger Picture agenda, which is sponsored by [chairman] James Murdoch and the CEO, Jeremy Darroch, means we have got sponsorship right the way from the top of the organisation," McDonald emphasises.

Less Is More
Consolidating data centres is a smart green solution. Using existing data centres more effectively is another, according to Steve Ault, a former data-centre manager at an online bank in the UK. As he sees it, spending £1m on new hardware for an existing data centre makes more sense than spending between £5m and £10m for an entirely new facility, the typical price range.

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