Half of the afternoon sessions at the
Green:Net 09 conference focused both on the size of the problem facing us, and presented some in-depth and tech-specific solutions to green IT issues.
Where the morning session (which I wrote up briefly
yesterday dealt more with and general discussions of the issues at hand, at the start of the afternoon sessions we were treated to back-to-back explorations of how green IT can be a solution to (instead of just a cause of) the climate crisis.
(Side note: because I had scheduled interviews during lunch that ran long, I missed Saul Griffith's gloomy but well-received and much-discussed presentation, "An Engineer's Approach To Climate. Working Backwards From Where We Want To Be." I'll update this post with a link to that video when the Green:Net team gets it posted later this week.)
First up on the IT front was
Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, who started out echoing Griffith's gloom by talking about just how sobering the scope of the climate crunch is. Given that we're likely to face at least a two degree Celsius temperature change, and possibly as high as six degrees C., the world is facing some serious changes. "It's not going to be a lot of fun for the generation that goes from nine billion people to 2 billion, or even 1 billion," Bernard said.
Although the news is not good, there are still signs of progress both within Microsoft and within its global network of partners, Bernard explained. He talked about how, as of one year ago, Microsoft world headquarters in Redmond, Wash., used to use 16 million Styrofoam cups every year -- as well as a "couple million plates" and other items. A year later, the company has cut its waste stream by 50 percent and now composts all waste from its cafeteria and cut out additional waste from bottled water and other items.
"And all of this was because of one employee who was just looking for a reason to do the right thing," Bernard explained.
From one person to IT managers doing the right thing, the next Green:Net panel focused on putting your data centers on a low-carbon diet. The panel brought together data center experts from Cisco, IBM, Dell, Yahoo and the Uptime Institute to talk about the biggest challenges and potential benefits of streamlining data center operations.
Kicking off the panel, Kenneth Brill from the
Uptime Institute pointed out that the facility side of IT gets too much attention, when much more of the promise of green IT comes from updates from the hardware and software side.
Speaking of promising numbers: Rich Lechner,
IBM's VP of energy and environment, told the crowd that for every $1 that IBM saves on energy usage through green IT investments, they're also saving $6 to $8 in operational expenses, whether from HVAC, real estate, hardware, or other areas.
Lechner also laid out the three most useful leverage tools for any IT professional or CTO: "Virtualization is the single biggest lever you can pull," he said, whether you're virtualizing your network, servers, storage or desktop clients. The second big lever is energy management, whether installing in-house energy management systems or managing clients' energy usage in a service-level agreement. Finally, he said, "the third lever is attacking the demand side of the equation. Without attacking that you don't have a sustainable equation."
Brill also highlighted the Uptime Institute's recent push for "
Energy Czars" to take a high-level look at energy used in organizations -- an idea mentioned earlier by Bernard, who also bemoaned the fact that only about 15 percent of IT managers actually see their energy bills.
By appointing a single person who is in charge of overseeing energy use and driving out inefficiencies across the organization, Brill estimates that companies can save $144 million over four years in energy bills.
But no matter what steps an organization takes, the panelists all agreed that the only way to do it is to do it.
"We're in analysis paralysis mode," Brill said. "If you just begin, you begin to find things -- it doesn't matter what you measure, just start to measure. But if you're not looking at the numbers and you're not looking at the ratios, then you're never going to find solutions."
