Blog posts tagged with 'green'

I've been encouraged lately by a noticeable rise in interest in Green IT. For some time I have been talking and blogging about the need to reduce the somewhat significant ecological footprint of IT operations, and I can tell you that even little over a year ago the reaction was mostly one of indifference. At some presentations, I could almost hear the whispers of "go back to Berkeley hippy", even though I have never been there and my hair is quite short .Fellow Green advocates  reported similar results, so it wasn't just my presenting skills. Lately though, the questions I get at presentations show not only more interest, but more engagement and a wider understanding of the issue. Mostly this engagement comes from people in Government IT roles, where there are departmental Green directives with real targets  on  a wide range of operational activities, including  IT.

Increasingly it is also businesses that are starting to understand that there can be financial benefits to reducing the amount of electricity being used to power IT, a fairly major factor in ITs environmental impact (the other main factors are hardware making its way into landfills and the hazardous materials used in manufacturing hardware). With average commercial electricity prices rising 12% since 2005 (a figure I worked out from checking out the US Dept of Energy site), coupled with the fact that  we have been throwing more and more servers (each increasingly power hungry due to their increased performance) into our data centers, the cost of powering these data centers must surely becoming more noticeable.

However, when I mention rising power costs to an audience, I like to ask for a show of hands on how many of them, being IT professionals, actually see their power bill let alone are held accountable. Usually the response is about 10% who do. This may go partly to explain the still low adoption of Green IT plans in businesses as the pain points are not being felt by CIOs, and maybe even the CFO/CBCs ("Chief Bean Counters") who get the corporate power bill have not yet put 2 and 2 together.

So, this leads me to my the question I'd like to throw out there - with most of the economic outlooks forecasting a downturn over the next year or so, will the resultant close look at costs be an opportunity to promote Green IT strategies that are goaled on measured on reducing operating and capital costs?

If you are looking for an opportunity to get approval for a Green IT project at work, this may be your chance. Even if you aren't that motivated by the need to reduce ITs carbon footprint, wouldn't you rather have your companies reduce costs by using virtualization to reduce the power bill and hardware costs than having to do something else such as layoffs?

Either way, your Green IT proposal needs to be sold to the CFO as well as the CIO. As such, your plan will need to include real and measurable financial targets  on the amount of electricity cost savings as well as the usual ROI.

I'm planning on creating a calculator that can demonstrate the ROI of Green server consolidation and thin client projects. If you have any ideas or know of similar calculators, please let me know.

Also, if you are in a Government department and want to raise awareness of Green IT with your CIO, we are holding a Virtual Roundtable on Green It in Government on August 12.   A panel of experts from Federal, State and Local Government agencies, as well as Simon Crosby from Citrix will be there to discuss ROI models, existing mandates and what the future may hold. This will be a low time investment opportunity for your CIO to learn more about Green IT. If you are a CIO yourself, I'm glad to see you are choosing to use some of your valuable time to read my blog and please register for the Roundtable  .

You can register for the Virtual CIO Roundtable here.  

In my previous blog entry, I described the Green benefits of telecommuting and my plan to "road test" telecommuting technologies and experience. For my first test, I have chosen voice communications.

My reasons for choosing this over something more obvious such as remote application access, is that most telecommuting scenarios that I have seen or experienced were based on the telecommuter being able to use a mobile phone for making and receiving calls business calls. This is not always the case, and not in my current temporary scenario where I am overseas from my Silicon Valley office. And if my mobile phone did work here, it would be extremely expensive to use for the number and length of calls I normally make. Generally, I also find this reliance on mobile phone a hassle due to the cost when compared to business or even home landlines, and the knowledge that people who want to call me need to know a. that I am not currently in the office and, b. what my cell phone number is.

Here's something else, I strongly believe that talking is still the most efficient and effective form of communication between two people and sometimes more. I have seen way too much misunderstanding, delays, unnecessary stress or conflict through even best written email, as the written word often lacks the nuances you get in verbal communications. While talking on the phone is still less effective than true face to face talking, it still is a big advancement on email or even IM. I'm sorry, but emoticons just don't match body language ?.

So, as I start this particular evaluation, I have three criteria that I want to test:

1. As many of us work in a highly mobile manner, with the "office" now including when working from home, business travel and other mobile scenarios, how do we maintain a consistent way to be contacted by voice as well as email?

2. We all have a single work email address that is constant wherever we are, but what about our phone number? Why is it that we have to guess whether the best phone number to use is the desk or cell phone?

3. How often do you have to be the manual link between two electronic systems when you have to enter a phone number from an email or customer record into a phone keypad? How often do you type the wrong number because of this? I know I have.

4. How expensive is it to use mobile, home or hotel phones to maintain a consistent amount of voice communication? I believe that the frequency of calls to staff, management, colleagues and customers should not diminish just because you are not in the office.

Now the last 2 of these criteria I can test by using one of Citrix's own products, EasyCall. By installing EasyCall, I can make calls from my PC either by entering the number, or using the click to call feature to dial directly from, say, an email footer. Rather than being a VoIP solution, EasyCall connects a call by first calling my own phone (could be my home line or mobile) before establishing the connection to the number I have dialed. It also has a pretty cool corporate directory function, allowing me to search for colleagues by their name in a similar manner to the deskphone I have in the office.

Now before you think I am just using this blog just to promote EasyCall, there are still the other 2 telecommuting phone criteria that it seems I cannot use EasyCall to evaluate. This means that I still have not re-routed inbound calls so that people calling me, especially from outside Citrix, need not to know that I am in the office or out. In previous telecommuting scenarios I have had to set up, I achieved this by using softphone products such as Avaya IP Agent. In my personal life, I am a heavy user of Skype, so will also be looking at it and other VoIP solutions for inbound calls as well as possibly outbound. The only issue I can foresee with this is that my current connection to the internet has nowhere near the performance I have become used to in California, which may mean the call quality is not to flash. I'll keep you posted on what I try for inbound calls and how it works (or not).

Now back to EasyCall. To use it, I need to install an agent as well as have a EasyCall Gateway installed between the LAN and PBX. Fortunately, the good folks at Citrix IT Services have installed the gateway, allowing me to worry only about the agent. Installing the EasyCall agent is pretty straight forward, the only things I really need to know is where to find the installation files and the host name of my EasyCall Gateway. To see what the installation process was like, check it out at http://www.utipu.com/app/tip/id/2955.

As with all my blogs on Telecommuting, I am eager to hear from you your own views on this topic, or any criteria or scenarios you think I have missed for my evaluations. Just post a comment to this entry.

Most of what is written on Green IT concentrates on how the IT Department can reduce the carbon footprint of its operations, primarily through reducing Data Center power consumption. While this is important as IT operations makes up 2-3% of global power consumption, our efforts to reduce our environmental impact should not end with the data-center. As well as including the end-point into Green IT planning (something I covered in a previous entry), IT can have a role in enabling Green business practices such as the paper-less office, Remote Collaboration (thus reducing the need for business travel) and Telecommuting.

Its this last practice, Telecommuting, which I want to discuss in more detail. For one thing, its something that we can do as individuals (work and management permitting, of course) as well as on a cross-company, cross-industry and even national basis. It fits in with the "think globally, act locally" mantra, with the emphasis on "local".

The Telecommuting trend has for some time been more tied to employee satisfaction, work-life balance and increasingly recruitment strategies (such as "homesourcing"). However, the rapid increase in the price of oil has made the cost of commuting to work a much larger percentage of household budgets, and therefore more noticeable to the average Joe or Jane. While many of us may wish that people would find other motivations to reduce their carbon footprint other than the hip-pocket nerve, rising costs will probably have the most realistic chance of effecting widespread change.

Increasing the number of employees that telecommute rather than drive to the office can cause a significant reduction in the fuel consumption, and therefore carbon emissions, of those individual employees. While this may seem obvious, you can read a detailed study conducted by the University of California....back in 1988! As well, more recent EPA studies have shown that even a 10% reduction of cars during peak hours can reduce the fuel consumption of those vehicles still traveling to the office, as the improved traffic flow results in less time burning fuel in gridlock. To get an idea of how this works, think about how much better your own commute is during school vacation periods.

While this shows there there would be significant benefits to the environment if a greater proportion of the workforce spent at least some time of the working week telecommuting, how practical is this generally, and in specific job roles? If your job does not involve "face time" with customers, telecommuting is probably a more practical option for you than those involved in regular customer interaction. That being said,  there are a number of organizations allowing call-center agents to work from home, such as Cox Communications.

While I have regularly telecommuted over the last decade or so, as well as introduced telecommuting programs for employees doing Tech Support and Customer Care, I have decided to use a period where I need to work remotely to try to measure (at least to qualify if not to quantify) the effectiveness of the technologies used to enable telecommuting. Over the next few weeks, I will blog on my experience based on the following criteria:

• Voice: How can I remain in verbal contact with staff, colleagues and customers? How do they get in contact with me without having to know whether I am in the office or not?
• Applications: How does my app performance vary when not in the office? What impact does occasional offline access make to this?
• Security: What would happen if my laptop or home PC was stolen or otherwise compromised? How do I set up my physical facilities to minimize security risks?
• Collaboration: How important are those "water-cooler" discussions and other face-to-face formal and informal interactions? If they are important, how do you replicate this when remote?

I have experienced challenges with each of these criterion in my own experiences as well as those relayed to me be customers.
While most of the technologies I will be using come from Citrix (partly because we like to eat our own dog food but mainly because we have been a long-time enabler remote work practices such as telecommuting), I will be also looking at other products and technologies to fill any gaps or compare.

I mentioned earlier that I want to use this as an opportunity to discuss telecommuting. As such, I would really appreciate your comments and suggestions on what I should be testing (technologies, criteria and scenarios), what your own experiences have been, and whether you think an increased proportion of your work time as telecommuting would have a benefit to you, your employer, customers/partners and the environment. Please contribute to this discussion by posting comments to this entry. In a later entry I will add a forum address if there is sufficient interest in this topic.

I was fortunate enough to recently meet Christian Knermann from the Fraunhofer Umsicht Institute in Germany. Christian and some of his colleagues conducted a study on the positive environmental impact of replacing PCs with thin clients, using XenApp to deliver their desktops and applications. Having very precise  calculations combined with a detailed explanation of how these calculations were made is significant.

I've been promoting the concept of Green IT within and outside of Citrix for some time now,  motivated by the desire to do something for this world we live in at work as well as in my personal life. While I haven't converted to solar power yet, I have replaced all my commuting and most of my personal traveling from car to bike. I know this isn't something everyone can do (and I can't lug my family of 5 behind me on a bike), I believe we all can do something to reduce the environmental impact of IT operations.

I won't get into the argument of the causes or even the existence of global warming, but it is obvious to anyone that the more electricity we use to power Data Centers and end-points, the more pollution is released into the air. As well, the frequency in which we replace our hardware (and I have been a culprit here) in turn increases the amount of landfill, including some hazardous materials, into the environment.

In my efforts to raise Green IT awareness, I have seen a lot of calculations of the benefits of one technology over another. Sometimes its difficult to verify or even understand the math involved - which has been noticed and noted by others. Particularly when these calculations are on the power consumed or saved, and the costs involved. In many of the cases, I can see the logic behind them and therefore give the results some credence, but I would not have the same level of confidence if I had to relay these figures to an audience, especially one comprised of geeks who tend to, like me, question figures that are stated.

And that is where the Fraunhofer study becomes useful. Their study takes into consideration criteria such as the entire life-cycle of hardware from manufacturing to disposal, the different profiles of user from light to power users and even the effect of powering off at night. Impact was measured not only in power consumption, but also emissions, hazardous waste and even water consumed. The report is very detailed and includes a lot of graphs and tables to support their findings.

I recommend that anyone interested in implementing Green IT take a look at the report which can be found here. While the primary focus of the report is on replacing PCs with Thin Clients, it also covers in summary additional approaches such using 64 bit processors as well as virtualization.

If you speak german, you can also see and hear Christian talk about his work at the Synergy Underground site(http://community.citrix.com/underground/). The badly mangled german questions are from me .