April 26, 2009

Go GREEN

Aplicor was fortunate to be named one of the 2009 top 12 Green IT vendors by IDG Computerworld last week. While that recognition is appreciated, I'm even more jazzed by the number of customers, colleagues and even one competitor that have reached out to me in an effort to better understand our green strategy and payback. I'm going to use this blog post as a starting point to share our experiences and lessons learned.

Aplicor adopted its GREEN program in February 2006 with the simple goals of reducing energy consumption, lowering carbon emissions and saving money. After about 90 days of industry research followed by about another 60 days of internal ops review, we assembled the team, defined the mission and created the project plan to get to work. Due to some good IT and financial record keeping we were able to baseline our major IT and non-IT ops back to April 2003. To date, we have accumulated five years of benchmarking data points in the areas of energy, water use, greenhouse gas emissions and recycling.

While our green initiatives have evolved and grown over time, they have always been multi-faceted and approached with resource accountability and formal project management discipline. Each initiative is base lined, forecast, implemented, measured, optimized, remeasured and then trended for continuous process improvement. For an exhaustive list of green measures adopted by Aplicor, see the prior blog post SaaS is Green I posed about two years ago. While we didn't originally do everything in the most efficient order, I've listed several green initiatives below in a more logical order that I would loosely recommend to others desirous of achieving green results.

• Server consolidation and virtualization are the relatively quick and big hits which kick off most green strategies. We found it most practical to implement this in phases and were able to reduce our total number of servers by one-third in the first phase. I have spoken to several colleagues and peers who question whether virtualization is truly ready for major business applications in the data center. As an operator of multiple data centers on multiple continents hosting a mission critical business software application for many global companies, I am obsessed with uninterrupted uptime and the many underlying components such as high availability and fail safe redundancy. Also, as a relentless green advocate, I'd like to quickly counter my peers concerns, however, some of those concerns remain legitimate. Whether virtualization is right for you is an individual decision. At Aplicor our internal ops are fully virtualized and we are proceeding down a phased path with regard to virtualization in our production data centers.

• Perform a data center review. I've performed several and just by walking around almost always discover material savings opportunities. In a prior review of a colleague's site, I discovered two adjacent rooms to the data center which were empty however being cooled. Closing the vents and not cooling these rooms saved energy and materially improved the cool air flow in the hot/cold isles.

• Printer consolidation. Ridding the unnecessary number of dedicated printers reduced energy consumption in this category by a whopping 51%.

• Replacement of old, inefficient and unnecessary equipment. You never know what relics you may find when walking through some of those IT and server rooms. In my case, I was able to find antiquated equipment which could be deprecated, underutilized UPSs which were consolidated and find and replace CRT monitors with much more energy efficient flat screens. New PCs not only consume less power but their desktop power management systems alone have saved us 16% in this function. I've had several colleagues share with me that by walking around they discovered PCs and servers running for no apparent reason - and were able to decommission those devices. As a side note, Aplicor provides purchase preference for server equipment which is Energy Star compliant and laptops which are EPEAT Gold certified. We also prefer servers with new multicore CPUs, energy optimized MAID (massive array of idle disks) storage and intelligent power management.

• Look at data storage hard as storage devices are often the most power intensive equipment in the computing stack. Energy savings opportunities are often limited to servers, yet storage systems while fewer in number are generally growing their capacity at 50% per year (source: IDC) and are among the largest energy consumers in the data center. Storage equipment is also often ideal for improvement as it consumes 13 times more power than traditional server processors and storage assets often have a very low utilization. Compression and de-duplication technologies can have a big impact. Changing user behaviors to reduce their electronic storage requirements by deleting obsolete data or limiting file attachments can also have a measurable effect in storage management and energy consumption.

• Installing a VoIP telephone system will consolidate the voice infrastructure onto the data network and achieve energy and capital savings. We also found that our new Cisco VoIP system realized several other productivity benefits, particularly with inner-office calling and the benefits of CTI (computer telephony integration).

• Using paper substitution and recycling paper, printer cartridges and other materials is a continuous savings opportunity. Start sending electronic instead of hardcopy customer statements and you'll save both postage and paper.

• While IT may provide significant energy savings opportunities, expanding your green culture beyond IT and into your ops will yield much more savings. A few of the initiatives we have implemented with good payback and are easily replicable include:

  • Increased telecommuting. With good communication tools such as VoIP, remote presentation tools (we use GoToMeeting), virtual whiteboard sessions, IM, videoconferencing and a suite of social media tools which includes Twitter, we are able to maintain our culture and communications in a virtual environment that is comparable to the face to face setting while realizing significant savings in long range travel and daily commuting. The reduction in travel related emissions is material and goes straight to the bottom line.

  • Financial incentives to staff for green ideas provide a constant reminder of the mission and solicit participation from across the company.

  • Taking it a step further, we have incorporated green thinking, ideas and accomplishments into staff performance reviews. Our staff performance reviews and incentive compensation are favorably based on measurable reductions in energy consumption, water utilization and waste generation.

  • As part of our procurement process, we review the energy needs for new products as well as the environment impact in the areas of packaging and disposal. We also require vendors to complete a form indicating where waste is distributed after it leaves our premises.

Have suggestions of your own? I would really like to hear them.

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Posted by Chuck Schaeffer on April 26, 2009 in Organizational Framework
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