IDC's Green IT Conference 2008 - Kuala Lumpur

1. Problems and Opportunities - by IDC:

Driven by the realization that climate change is an issue that businesses can, and should, mitigate, both commercial and government organizations are under pressure to 'go green'. IDC's research has shown this driver has filtered down into the IT department as organizations question what Green IT can do in this overall 'Green' strategy. As CIOs embark on this journey, there is clear evidence that 'going green' not only saves the planet, it also makes good business sense. Hence, the IDC event theme, The Economy of Ecology.



This is the first leg of the 9 to be held in 9 major cities in SEA.

IDC presented the following agenda which consists of three main items.

1. The Green Bet - IDC Framework for green IT.
2. The 2.9% Problem
3. The 97.1% opportunity

The Green Bet:

Three major components:

1. Green Business - Doing business in a green way
2. Green Energy - Using green ways to generate energy
3. Green Tech. - Green products

The challenge to get CEOs and CIOs to adopt such framework ?

Most CIOs do not have Green IT as part of their KPIs and usually do not go far from the followings:

• Budget Management
• Meeting Deadlines
• Innovation

Another point to look into is that the drivers for investment in Green IT according to IDC are the followings by percentage:

• Cost-Saving - 75.3%
• CSR 58.2%
• Products which helps compliance - 55.8%
• Recycling - 45.5%

This brings good news, people are motivated by cost-saving and CIOs are actually starting to count on Green IT as a tool for achieving higher competitiveness.


The 2.9% Problems:

According to IDC, 2.9% is just about the percentage of total US electricity being used by data centers (in the USA).

So, they are tasked to reducing the electricity consumption because it is significant even though 2.9% is not a big thing and also the fact that power and cooling (P/C) cost is actually higher than investment into servers.

Big players like Google, Microsoft and Fujitsu have all built their data centers with green technologies and policies.

As a result the influence, the priorities of data centers for SEA have started to have Green IT (Power & Cooling) in the percentage range of 10% to 50%. Not too bad actually, check out the chart below.


So, power and cooling is a big thing.

IDC recommends that organization will embrace the Green IT culture by focusing on power and cooling as the starting point using the following framework:

• Measure
• Design
• Conserve
• Reduce
• Predict

As a result of that, organizations can reap good energy saving benefits, in particular:

• Hardware perspective - 34%
• Operations - 19%
• Power & Cooling efficiencies - 27%

That is a total of 50% savings!!

The 97.1% Opportunity:

The 2.9% problems give us vast opportunity to improve and create economies. It is about sustainability.

Green technologies mean big business. According to IDC, the following technology will generate the business value of:

• Smart Grids - $125 billion
• Smart Offices - $340 billion
• Smart Engines - $107 billion
• Smart Logistics - $442 billion

So, with Green IT, not only organization can reap direct benefits (cost-saving), it creates opportunity for CIOs to be proactive in terms of driving agendas and creating business case.

In short, Green IT + Business Case = Values.

The presentation was conducted by Mr. Philip Carter, Associate Research Director, APAC IT Services Research, IDC APAC. Download the full presentation slides from here.

2. Total Solutions - By HP

According to Mr. David Triggs, HP has all the solutions for Green IT.

HP stresses that technology is no longer just supporting business, it runs the business.

HP Helps Customers to Build Business Case for Green IT:

Foremost, HP business technology portfolio helps customers to build business case for adopting Green IT. The core components of HP services are:

1. Business Information Optimization
2. Business Technology Optimizataion
3. Adaptive Infrastructure

According to HP, energy efficiency creates the following benefits for customers.

• Reduce Cost
• Mitigate Risks
• Enable Growth
• Protect Brand & Unlock Opportunities

This is especially true for those people dealing with data centers.

So, HP IT Environment Lifecycle Management aims at helping customers to get to green business technology faster and with less risk. The lifecycle defines 4 major steps:

• Acquire
• Manage
• Retire
• Transition

And their services include design, consolidation and implementation; total solution.



So, why choose HP to help with going green ? Because they have best practices. Also, because they have done a lot of 'advertisements' with this regard such as:

HP's goal is to reduce combined energy consumption by 25% by 2010
• Raising standards in supply chain
• Replacing IT power costs with renewable sources (solar systems)

HP's Energy Innovation Roadmap ?

• Design energy-efficient products
• Improve energy efficiency of customer & HP operations
• Rethink energy use to transform society

Last but no least, HP recommends virtualization.

Mr. David Trigss is Senior IT Consultant for HP, download the full presentation slides from here.

Also check out www.hp.com/go/greencomputing

3. Intel Felt Obligated with their CSR

On a the holistic, Intel's role in energy efficiency has always been:

• Committed to Sustainability
• Build Leading Products
• Having Data Center Best Practices
• Initiated Industry Leaderships

But, the biggest thing is not really the operations part of it.. it is their product. Intel's CSR (corporate social responsibility) reported that 80% of Intel’s global carbon footprint results from the
industry’s use of Intel's products. So, this is big problem for them. They have to innovate even better products and therefore they have recently created the New 45NM Hi-K Processor; Quad-core Intel Xeon Processor 5400 Series.



This is an award winning invention and it really does the followings:

• Improved Transistor Density
• 20% improved transistor switching speed
• 30% reduction in switching Power

The makes Intel able to continue with Moore's law pursuit without compromising the CSR.

And Intel recommends server refresh and virtualization.

Server refresh basically means the act of dumping old hardwares for newer ones in order to get more benefits than trying to achieve faster ROI. Not only that, by means of a scenario of comparing the data center technology of 2004 with 2008, undergoing server refresh actually produces the ROI of less than 2 years. That is:

• 83% reduction in floor space
• 87% reduction in annual costs

This gives you $57k of estimated energy savings.

Fantastic.

Intel's presentation is facilitated by Mr. Eddie Toh (Regional Platform Marketing Manager, Server Platforms Group, Intel APAC). Proceed to download the full slides from here.

4. Virtualization by Novell

Virtualization is hero of the day; it is the buzz word. The concept of virtualization is that only 20% of your hardware capacities are being used to do any work, while 80% will be doing nothing, hence burnt.

Suse Linux Enterprise has built-in virtualization technology. It has the Xen 3.x
Hypervisor-Based Virtualization, it software and it can work well with Microsoft operating system. This is not possible before the interop partnership between Microsoft and Novell. Check out more, www.moreinterop.com.



With virtualization, you can treat hardware and resources as software by just copy and paste your operating systems (that is running with live processes) to and fro hardwares. This forms the basis for cloud computing.

All SAP solutions are supported on Suse Linux Enterprise and now with virtualization, you can actually treat Suse Linux as the main platform while treating Microsoft as the ad-hoc platform.

With virtualization, replication and automation technology, Novell is able to deliver to you:

• Server Consolidation
• High availability and Disaster Recovery
• Data Center Automation - Humanless data center (to mitigate human errors)

Novell's presentation is presented by Mr. Kam Han Wen (Senior Technology Specialist). Check out the full slides at here.

Malaysia's Perspective ?

The Green IT concept is actually another way for Malaysia IT companies to break the ice. Not long ago, the buzzword was SOA (service oriented architecture). Now ?? almost forgotten by everybody.

So, would Malaysia company brace up the challenges now ?

Conclusion:

• Small problem, big opportunity.
  
• Green IT biggest benefit are cost-saving and enhance competitiveness.
• Buy Intel's products
• Use virtualization. It is cool.

Also check out SAS Intelligently Green Forum 2008.