Go for green IT strategy
Bangalore: Thinking green is not a choice anymore, and technology is no exception to this rule. So can the large, wiry entangled server that holds the reins to your entire network help arrest global warming?
Yes, certainly. When digitisation rendered the office paper-free, greens rejoiced, only to soon realise that mammoth servers and networks that run the show are but huge energy sinks.
While a large amount of research has concentrated on mainframes and server data centres, what about the networks that connect our systems? Increasing energy use and related costs have left technologists scrambling for solutions that are energy-efficient, let’s say “green.”
Design solution
So how will this greening take shape? Greening a network is about looking for intelligent design solutions to minimise energy consumption — both hardware and software.
This needn’t mean a complete overhaul of a network; to use a basic example — putting your voice signal and data through a single router instead of a router and a branched PBX is a form of saving on equipment.
But green designing can be two-fold. Hardware can be tweaked by using higher quality silicon or redesigning structures to minimise heat dissipation. On the software side, applications can throttle power consumption by using intelligent adapters, or by going for something as logical as a single operating system (OS).
New offerings
Take networking firm Juniper Networks’ JUNOS for instance. Sridhar Sarathy, VP, Juniper India operations, explains that using singular OS across its routing, security and switching devices enables it to deliver new offerings with minimal changes and allows re-use of existing hardware and line cards.
The hardware side is a tad more complex. Juniper’s tX Matrix plus architecture supports 25 Tbps, which sounds like a whole lot of energy use. But by integrating just up to 16 T1600 routers — which by itself cuts energy and cooling needs by 40 per cent — into a node, it can save both material and power.
But how much difference can these micro readjustments really make? Quite a bit, it seems, and this goes much beyond the four walls of a data centre. Take networking firm CISCO’s Connected Real Estate (CRE) that connects an entire estate through an inter-operable building management solution over an IP backbone. In simple words, the network running your elevator, alarm system and your water pump will possibly be integrated.
Varghese M. Thomas, PR Head, Cisco (India & SAARC), says solutions lie in designing. “Green products deliver features and benefits that influence not only how green a networking device is, but also how green it makes one’s network, IT infrastructure and operations.” Its aggregation routers alone can result in carbon footprints savings up to 3,754 gallons of gasoline or 17 tons of coal annually, a Synergy Research study stated.
Configuration changes
And it’s not about the network equipment alone which forms just 15 per cent of the data centre’s energy use. An intelligent network can reduce 20 per cent of the remaining 85 per cent, i.e. server and storage equipment. Energy management has to be about end-to-end optimisation, believes Murali Ramalingam, CEO, ConnectM. “We use management tools that work on self-learning algorithms and use a range of data sources — from workload run-times to time-of-day to business impact — to make configuration changes, adjust workloads and schedule to maximise.”
Reducing carbon emissions of corporates is vital to green IT, a task that recession-induced cost cutting has indirectly fulfilled. The bottom line is that implementing a green IT strategy is good for business and for the IT budget, says Mr. Sarathy.
