Greening Your IT

Computer networks and the Internet have freed businesses of all sizes from many of the visible costs associated with intra-office communication. Gone are the days of fax machines and couriers. Today, a user at his desk can instantly send a 300 page report to his colleagues on the other side of the planet for next to nothing. Almost nothing, though, isn’t the same as free. There are real costs associated with transmitting emails, both in dollars and cents and in greenhouse gases.

McAfee, Inc. and the climate-change researchers from ICF International have calculated the amount of energy required to transmit, process, and filter all of the spam email sent worldwide for an entire year. Their results are astounding:

[the annual energy] totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same green house gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

Each spam message is responsible for, on average, 0.3 grams of CO2. That is the equivalent of driving your car three feet! Multiply that by the 358 spams I received yesterday and you’ll see the enormity of the situation. Non-spam email doesn’t have quite the same costs associated with it, because much of spam’s energy consumption comes from users deleting it and trying to find the legitimate email mixed amongst it. But, it does cost something.

Green computing is an effort to make networks and computers more energy efficient. Because corporate computer systems rely on wide variety of computers, networking equipment and employees, there are many techniques available to green up your IT infrastructure. One of the best options for greening your computer systems is to take advantage of virtualization technologies. Virtualization is the process by which software running on a computer is separated from the computer itself.

Here’s an example of virtualization in laymen’s terms: Windows Vista normally runs on a PC. When it needs to play a sound, it sends a message to the computer’s speakers; when it wants to display an image, it talks to the video card. When virtualized, it is possible to run multiple copies of an operating system on a single computer at the same time. When the OS needs to play a sound, instead of a message traveling to the computer’s speakers, a request is sent to the virtualization host software which then decides what to do with it.

What’s the point of this, you ask? Well, unless you’re playing an intense game or something, most computers don’t use 100% of their available resources. In fact, most of the time, a computer’s processor and memory usage is closer to 1% of the available power. With virtualization, you can take an entire server, and make a clone of itself inside another. That virtualized computer can operate just as well in a virtual environment as it would as a real computer. Since it’s only using a fraction of the available resources, you can also add the clones of other machines to the same computer. Depending on your application and hardware you can easily run ten, twenty or even fifty machines inside of a single server.

The real benefit, though, of virtualization, is that it makes sense not just for the environment, but also for the bottom line. All of the other green computing efforts won’t necessarily make such a large impact on the company’s finances, but taken together with the actions of other companies and individuals they might make a measurable impact on the environment.