Prepress

Going Green – IT and Environmental Sustainability

Friday 30. January 2009 - Of all the factors contributing to the past two decades of economic and political change around the world, one stands above the rest: information technology (IT).

By Jeff Nick
This article is adapted from a keynote address delivered by EMC Chief Technology Officer Jeff Nick at the 19th annual IT infrastructure conference, held last November at UN Headquarters in New York. EMC was a co-sponsor of the event.
Of all the factors contributing to the past two decades of economic and political change around the world, one stands above the rest: information technology (IT).
Once considered a privilege of developed countries, IT now bridges the gap between the developed and developing world. Access to information itself has become an equalizer and a mobilizer in the effort to meet two urgent challenges: climate change and our ability to create a sustainable global environment.
IT is growing at an astonishing rate. According to an IDC white paper sponsored by EMC, the amount of information created, captured, and replicated in 2007 totaled 281 billion gigabytes—more than three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. And between 2006 and 2011, the amount of data added annually to the digital universe will increase 10 times.
At EMC, when we consider the implications of this growth on climate change, we ask two key questions:
How, in the immediate- to near-term, can IT minimize its impact on the global environment?
How can IT support cultural and process changes that help people and organizations respond tactically, strategically, and systemically to create a more energy efficient world?
Mitigating the environmental impact of IT
As access to information over the Internet has become more global, ownership of the asset pool has become much less concentrated in developed nations. Near-ubiquitous connectivity and access to information has empowered people to contribute to the world’s knowledge base from every corner of the world. Harnessing this global human capital represents our best chance to address critical issues such as climate change.
But this ever-expanding digital universe is not a panacea: It has had environmental consequences. It consumes large amounts of resources to build out data centers and server farms, and it’s driving higher demands for energy. Yet many of these resources are being wasted. The average utilization rate for servers ranges from 5 percent to 15 percent and for non-networked storage, 20 percent to 40 percent. That means many companies are paying the energy costs to run data centers at 100 percent capacity, but are only using 5 percent to 15 percent of that capacity—a tremendous waste.
At the same time, as much as 70 percent of the information an organization accumulates may never or only rarely be accessed. Clearly, the IT industry must minimize the environmental impact of rapid information growth by attaining higher levels of efficiency. Three key technology initiatives support this goal:
Virtualization and consolidation
Information lifecycle management
De-duplication
Virtualization and consolidation are essential to energy conservation in the data center, where IT managers have installed more and more systems to enhance performance, redundancy, and availability, but without a focus on power or cooling efficiency. Virtualization addresses these inefficiencies by separating software from the underlying hardware, so that a single computer can run multiple operating systems and applications. In turn, better utilization of servers and storage means deployment of fewer machines—thereby using less electricity for power and cooling.
Information lifecycle management (ILM) is based on the premise that the value of information changes over time. ILM uses automatic intelligence to store information in the most appropriate and energy-efficient storage device at every point in its lifecycle. For example, business-critical and real-time information requires systems that offer the highest reliability and performance—and therefore demand more resources and power. When that information reaches a less critical state, ILM migrates it to storage that consumes less energy.
De-duplication vastly reduces the amount of stored backup data that results from users storing multiple copies and variations of the same file in many places across the network. De-duplication stops runaway duplication by transforming data files into data segments that can be stored and re-used in multiple files. The original file is saved and backed up just once to a central server. When file edits are sent to the server, they’re in the form of new and unique sub-file data segments associated with the original, and only those new segments are backed up. De-duplication can reduce network bandwidth and backup storage by a factor of 300.
Supporting global communities to change policies and outcomes
Beyond reducing the environmental impact of the information explosion, IT has a larger role to play as a vehicle through which information about environmental sustainability can be shared, enabling people to come together around the world to devise new approaches and solutions.
A new, global platform for collaboration—enabled by blogs, wikis, and social networks—has given rise to virtual communities, where everyone can contribute to a global dialogue by uploading their own ideas, content, and products for wide dissemination and comment. This is fundamentally changing the flow of information gathering, distribution, innovation, political mobilization, and more. And the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) itself has been using these technologies to collaborate across its global network.
However, a global collaborative effort on a vastly larger scale is needed to advance environmental sustainability. As the number of connections between people and organizations increases, so the ability to combine and recombine ideas accelerates. Knowledge sharing also builds social capital and trust, and emboldens people and groups to stand more forcefully and vocally behind their positions.
Creating environmental sustainability is a massive undertaking. It will demand global collaboration and cooperation among the largest and most influential stakeholders in the outcome—the United Nations, government and non-governmental organizations, businesses, universities, and individuals. It will demand taking a system view of energy generation, energy use, and climate change.
And it will require a combination of incentives, standards, grants, continued research, and imagination and innovation to drive the global changes needed in what is a shrinking timetable. IT is positioned to play a critical and central part in this urgent task.