Green Data Center : Organizational Solutions

By Aditya Mhatre at 24 December, 2008, 6:55 am

This is part 3 of a 3-part series about Green Data center

After discussing the technology solutions for Green data center, lets take a look at the organizational changes that would be required.

Management or Organizational Approaches

Incentive backed programs

The CIO office will have to ensure that energy optimization and reduction is energy cost is part of IT manager’s key performance index. It is likely that the IT managers will definitely understand the importance of energy conservation, if energy bills are made part of their budget and their incentives are in some way tied to energy conservation. This would require installation of measurement devices that would account for the electricity being consumed by the server in the data centers. This is very important because it is not possible to manage something that isn’t being measured. This objective will have to cascade down from the CEO to CIO to IT managers.

Other Approaches

Building Design

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system is a benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of green buildings. Developed by the USGBC, LEED recognizes building performance in five areas: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. USGBC hasn’t provided any specific guidelines for LEED certification for data centers since LEED focuses on occupied building as opposed to a data center where most of the space is occupied by servers. Although there is no LEED certification for data center, it is still feasible for data centers to follow the check list provided by LEED. There are certain cases where the current LEED norms don’t make sense for a data center like having a 150 car parking area for a data center of 200,000 sq foot facility managed by only 5 people but certain norms like using local plants and flowers for landscaping purpose makes definite sense. Local plants and flowers have low cost of maintenance (less water) since they depend on natural local conditions. The Fannie-Mae data center, one of the two LEED certified data centers, got extra points for being close to railway station because it reduced the carbon foot print of the employees working in the data center.

Buildings are also now being designed in such a way to ensure the maximum use of day light instead of artificial lighting as well as using passive solar heating or cooling technologies. The downside of this approach is that it has to be adopted at an initial building design phase because converting existing structure proves to be extremely costly.

Corporate E-Waste Policy

Every organization should form an e-waste policy which would describe the way their IT organizations would retire their IT hardware in an environment friendly manner. Currently, the easiest way for organization to do this would be to participate in anyone of the “Take back” programs run by major vendors like Dell, IBM or HP. Infact, Dell accepts any computer brand in its recycle program. Dell reported recovery of 102 million pounds of IT equipment from customers in 2007, a 20% increase over 2006.

Conclusion

The realization of financial benefits from implementation of green IT initiatives will not be visible in the short term and needs a minimum of 18 to 24 months to feel the organizational impact. It is also very important to carry out regular audits of the processes to ensure compliance with organization’s green policy.

Read Part 1: Green Data center : Why is it Important?
Read Part 2: Green Data center: Technology Solution

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Categories : Technology