Smart IT Keeps 22,500 Cars Off The Highway

Just how exactly IT and green thinking delivers these new RoI numbers is what

Jagadeshwar Gattu, VP, DataCenter Services, HCL Technologies Infrastructure

Services Division (HCL ISD) spills out in this interview. He also comments on

many hotspots like Zero emission datacenters, ultrasonic humidification,

harmonic mitigating trans­formers, variable frequency drives while he handles

the good old debate on the right measuring tape for green IT






Recently research firm Ovum came out with new findings on 'sustainability' and
how CIOs are taking an inadequate view of it, also hinting at the need for green

IT audit and gap analysis as well as customizable approach for each

department/business function. Is it a hint in the right direction?

HCL views Green initiatives enterprise wide and understands that Green goals can

be set at an organization strategy level and then take a top down approach

leading to green business processes and Green workplace for employees. Green

goals can also follow at bottoms up approach wherein seeds of green initiative

can be sown at IT level and then progress towards an enterprise wide green

initiative. Looking at both approaches it is certain to have a convergence of

green goals across an organization. Hence it is imperative for CIOs to realize

the green horizon beyond just energy efficiency and carbon footprint reduction,

and in fact look at greater opportunities of IT enabling business processes to

become lean and thin.

Also considering, a complete product life cycle would consist of phases and

processes right from conception stage through development, supply chain

anddisposal or recycle stage. There are enough opportunities of realizing green

goals in each of these business processes and IT can definitely play an all

encompassing role and hence the need for CIOs to realize this void and lead

towards evolving sustainable business practices.

As you steer your company's transformation strategy, could you share something

on green re-engineering and technology refresh cycles?

While performing asset refresh for its customers, we take into account not only

the processing and compute efficiency of assets but also look at the carbon

footprint. Besides this, other factors of assets such as ageing details and its

alignment to customer's asset life cycle and customer's IT asset policies

alignment to their business requirement. By considering these factors, we ensure

that customer's existing investment is best leveraged by 'sweating' their

existing assets.

What intersection levels do hardware; networking and people components have on

Green goals?

Hardware has a significant impact on the power and space footprint as

highlighted by in-market technologies around these domains. These factors drive

the upfront capex requirement and also on the ongoing opex. Networking or

connectivity drives the information update cycle of an organization and is very

critical especially for financial and trading companies. People factor holds as

much importance for companies like us which are purely services offering based.

In the same vein, would you agree with Ericsson's Hans Vestaburg's statement

that 'Broadband is a pre-requisite to a low-carbon economy'?

The above thought and concept is in coherence with this statement.

Investments in telecom and mobile infrastructure will ensure advanced 'virtually

real' interaction among people using high speed tele-meeting/conferencing, grid

computing facilities. This would help people connect real time without being

physically present at one location.

Talking of datacenters in particular, are technology improvements like

ultrasonic humidification, high-efficiency harmonic mitigating transformers,

variable frequency drives etc helping enough?

Yes, the technology improvements are helping in terms of achieving energy

efficiency and power savings, however these require upfront investments and are

not ideal for retrofit kind of scenarios or leverage existing infrastructure

setups in datacenters. In the case of Ultrasonic Humidification; air surrounding

IT equipment can directly lead to its failure. Ultrasonic humidifiers rapidly

vibrate water to create a fog or mist that is introduced into the air stream

requiring humidification. The biggest advantage is energy savings as compared to

other types of humidifiers; these require around 90 percent less energy to

humidify same size space. These humidifiers are also easy to maintain. Cleaning

these is also easy but only if these are provided with purified water. The

downside of not cleaning these periodically would lead to 'charging' effect that

can lead to static electrical discharge.

When it comes to harmonic mitigating transformers, as our world becomes even

more dependent on electrical and electronic equipment, there is an increased

likelihood that operations will experience the negative effects of harmonic

distortion. The productivity and efficiency gains achieved from increasingly

sophisticated pieces of equipment have a drawback: increased harmonic distortion

in the electrical distribution system. Harmonic mitigating transformers (HMTs)

are a leading solution to help eliminate these harmful harmonics and improve

your system reliability. They eliminate transformer overheating and high

operating temperatures, save energy by reducing harmonic losses, maintain high

energy efficiency even under severe non-loading conditions and improve power

factor.

A variable frequency drive helps in saving energy in appliances that run much of

the time at partial speed and load. Air-cooled chillers at HCL NJ DC are

installed with VFD-based motors.

Would (IBM's) concept of Zero emission datacenter and changes around community

heating, re-use of wasted heat, chip stacking, water cooling etc turn to

practical scalable dimensions?

Zero-emission datacenters reduce the energy consumption by 40 percent and

directly reuse waste heat, for example, for space heating. This reduces

effective carbon dioxide emission by 85 percent. Efficiency and payback for heat

cut energy costs by a factor of two with a Roi of less than two years.

Water is an excellent coolant. This eliminates the need for today's

energy-hungry chillers in datacenters. Moreover, high-grade heat at the output

can be reused, for example, for space heating. IBMs breakthrough chip-stacking

technology called 'through-silicon vias' -allows different chip components to be

packaged much closer together for faster, smaller, and lower-power systems.

This project is a significant step towards energy-aware, emission-free computing

and data centers. The chip stacking phenomenon would enable faster processing

however; this would also lead to more energy or heat dissipation, which would

require additional cooling. The water-based heat reuse system is an effective

green solution which would not require additional power consumption.

What do you make out of the debates around various Green Metrics - PUE (Power

Usage Effectiveness) Vs DCiE (Data Centre Infrastructure Efficiency) Vs DCP

(Overall Data Centre Productivity i.e. IT's real value)?The PUE is defined as Total Facility Power/IT Equipment Power and its

reciprocal, the DCiE is defined as 1/PUE which is equal to IT Equipment

Power/Total Facility Power x 100 percent.

While both of these metrics are essentially the same, they can be used to

illustrate the energy efficiency at the facility level and help in optimizing

power requirement of infrastructure equipment. PUE indicates how efficient is

the facility to deliver power to IT equipment while DCiE indicates percent of

facility power going into IT equipment.

To get a comprehensive metric which addresses both facility and IT equipment

efficiency, DCP is intro­duced. Datacenter Produc­tivity (DCP) is arrived by the

formula 'Useful Work/Total Facility Power'. DCP focuses on amount of work that

can be done by IT equipment hosted at datacenter. This metric takes into account

the useful work which has value attributed to end user or business that is

supported by data center. While datacenter productivity is much more difficult

to determine as it is difficult and subjective to define and quantify the amount

of useful work done, it is a key strategic focus for the industry. In effect,

this calculation defines the datacenter as a black box — power goes into the

box, heat comes out, data goes into and out of the black box, and a net amount

of useful work is done by the black box.

Though PUE and DCiE focus on IT equipment effectiveness, DCP takes a holistic

overview of a datacenter and its components, ie mechanical and electrical

equipment besides IT equipment. To have any true value, PUE and DCiE also are

not benchmarks that can be done once or infrequently. They should be measured on

a regular, if not real-time basis at different times of the day and week.

So, HCL's take then would be?

HCL's take on the metrics is that a lot of activity has been happening around

DC metrics, however no single metrics ensures comparison of disparate DC

facilities around the globe. Each metrics comes with variable components and

constraints which vary across different facilities, hence making like to like

comparison of these facilities unrealistic.

Can you outline key expectations and plans of your recent New Jersey Data Centre

and how it fits with the company's overarching green horizon?

In addition to offering world class collocation services to our customer, HCL

plans to differentiate its Tier 3+ equivalent New Jersey Data center by offering

value add services such as industrialized delivery services, shared storage and

backup, shared networks and security services and also cloud based services.

How do you exactly make sure that aligns with company's milestones on Green

IT front?

The New Jersey Data center is using many green or energy efficiency

initiatives such as air cooled chillers which can be used as economizers during

cold weather to provide free cooling. These are also equipped with VFD

controlled pumps to save on energy. It also entails state-of-the-art command

center with Ergonomic chairs and consoles for 24X7 operation; and acoustic

ceiling tiles. This would include space footprint saving in datacenter by,

optimizing the hot aisle area using 'seven-tile' rule.

Talking of carbon footprint, how much has IT traversed from being part of the

problem to being part of the solution?






An EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency completed
in 2007 estimated that US datacenters consume 1.5 per cent of the total US

electricity consumption for a cost of $4.5 billion.From the year 2000 to the

year 2006, datacenter electricity consumption doubled in the US and is currently

on a pace to double again by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh. This is equal to

$7.4 billion in annual electricity costs. From the above fact and many other

similar reports, it is clear that the datacenter is a not only a major consumer

of power, but a major contributor to a company's energy bill. However, IT

companies and their corporate customers are changing the way computing assets

are designed manufactured, operated, and disposed off to gain efficiency and

cost savings, while reducing the environmentally harmful impacts.

And what ingredients define 'Real Green IT'?

The Green IT solution encompasses the following phases: Formulation of a

sound Green IT strategy; Designing and manufacturing greener products and Green

procurement of energy efficient products which have complete green lifecycle

right from inception to disposal. Talking of DataCenter strategies, lack of

power and space has been driving data center consolidation initiatives and

structural and technological changes to the datacenter spectrum. Consolidation

initiatives sometimes also lead to relocating datacenters to cheaper locations

and also 20 to 30 percent reduction of space. Structural changes focus on

redesigning/upgrading the data center flooring, power and cooling setup.

Technological changes include server and storage virtualization, power

management software.

Anything on non-technology side?

There are behavioral changes like changing people's attitude is also one of

the important factors to achieve operational and process effectiveness, making

the organi­zation lean and green. And in the area of recycling and disposal;

eco-friendly e-waste disposal policies and services have been incorporated to

ensure toxic wastes are disposed without causing any harm to the environment.








Would offerings like Cisco Unified Computing System plug the gap as claimed?

Cisco's UCS saves on travel and commuting by people across the globe thus

reducing their carbon footprint. Unified computing solution also ensures

that the compute, storage and network hardware components are integrated thus

leading to a greener footprint (definitely on space if not power) and help in

realizing green goals.

What's your strategy around idle computing resources and energy efficiency as a

metric of IT operational effectiveness?

So far, HCL, using its Green DC Services has impacted cost savings for the

enterprise by saving power to the tune of 11334 KW in a year which is equivalent

to 22,500 cars off the highway, 300,000 trees planted, 133,140,990 lbs reduction

in carbon emissions, reduced 15000 servers through virtualization and annual

energy cost savings of $10 million.






Pratima Harigunani


CIOL Bureau