The Green Audit

  by Kosten Metreweli | 20 Apr 2007 | Permalink | Everything Else

A new piece of research from Forrester (”Why Green IT Should Feature In Sourcing Plans“- by Euan Davis) suggests that sourcing executives will increasingly need to incorporate green considerations into their sourcing policies. I agree – here in the UK, the government’s target of a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 is going to require some tough legislation to actually happen. So far, the government has relied upon voluntary rather than mandatory compliance – which unsurprisingly is failing to deliver the required results. At the current rate of carbon reduction, the UK will only achieve 30% reductions in the 2050 timeframe. Growing grassroots awareness and activitism will certainly help drive the change, however a large part of the burden will fall on the shoulders of the business establishment.

For information-intensive businesses, their datacenters make up a large part of their carbon footprint. Adding carbon neutral, and energy star labelling of hardware products to procurement requirements is an important first step for organisations (a ‘quick button to press’ according to Forrester). Ultimately a holistic re-evaluation of the supply-chain is certainly required. However, procurement is only one piece of the puzzle. In much the same way as buying food labeled ‘low fat’ and ‘low sodium’ doesn’t make you a healthy person – how these products are used within the organisation needs a radical rethink. In the datacenter today, overall server utilisation can be as low as 10-20% – suggesting huge inefficiency – no matter how green the servers themselves are. This inefficiency translates to a real cost for organisations – power, real-estate, hardware, software and of course people to manage the sprawling infrastructure. Technologies such as virtualisation have a huge role to play in helping to increase utilisation – at the cost of yet more complexity to manage. Hopefully providing the means to manage that complexity, and reduce data center inefficiency will be part of Tideway’s contribution to saving the world.

Many companies (including many of Tideway’s customers) have taken the initiative and have set themselves voluntary carbon reduction targets. We’re now embarking on our own carbon reduction program, and hope to start showing results soon.