Business Sustainability is becoming increasingly important with the need to wisely consume the scarce resources such as water, energy etc.
IT industry is not an exception and IT professionals are obliged to think about ways and means to maintain a sustainable IT business while helping other businesses be more sustainable by developing innovative IT solutionsfor these businesses.
This lesson will discuss sustainability issues resulting from usage of IT solutions and how such issues can be addressed. We will also investigate some of ICT innovative ways of helping business sustainability
Green IT is another term used to refer to IT sustainability
2. Learning Objectives
What is IT-Sustainability
A Holistic Approach to Green IT
How IT contributes to carbon emission ?
Microprocessor technologies development
Data centers
Data Centers issues
Data Centers cooling solutions
Data Centers energy consumption solutions
Data Centers space usage solutions
Server virtualization
Cloud computing
SAAS
Benefits to the environment from the adoption of
E-commerce and E-business 2
3. Introduction
Business Sustainability is becoming increasingly important with the need to
wisely consume the scarce resources such as water, energy etc.
IT industry is not an exception and IT professionals are obliged to think
about ways and means to maintain a sustainable IT business while helping
other businesses be more sustainable by developing innovative IT solutions
for these businesses.
This lesson will discuss sustainability issues resulting from usage of IT
solutions and how such issues can be addressed. We will also investigate
some of ICT innovative ways of helping business sustainability
Green IT is another term used to refer to IT sustainability
4. IT-Sustainability (Green IT)
Green IT refers to environmentally sound
IT. It’s the study and practice of designing,
manufacturing, using, and disposing of
computers, servers, and associated
subsystems—such as monitors, printers,
storage devices, and networking and
communications systems—efficiently and
effectively with minimal or no impact on the
environment.
San Murugesan
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7. How IT contributes to carbon emission ?
A study by Gartner (2012) estimated that ICTs account for around 0.86
metric gigatonnes of carbon emissions annually, nearly 2% of global carbon
emissions
Sectors within the ICT industry that mainly contributed to such emission
are identified as:
The energy requirements of PCs and monitors (40%)
Data canters (23%)
Telecommunications (24%).
8. Microprocessor technologies
developments
Unused circuits are put
into low-power states
where possible
Circuit design
aggressive
improvements
The integration of
specialized
accelerators (graphics
processing units and
signal processors that
can perform certain
computations more
efficiently)
Software
component integration
This has led to improvement in power-consumption efficiency and decrease in
average power consumption. These improvements also help reduce heat emission.
9. Does using your mobile phone have any impact on
sustainability ?
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10. Data centers
The data center is the department in an enterprise that
houses and maintains back-end information technology
(IT) systems and data stores—— its mainframes, servers
and databases.
Gartner
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11. Data Centers issues
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Need for cooling
Energy consumption and Carbone emission
Need for space to store equipments
12. Data center innovative
cooling solutions
❑ Air-Side economizer
❑ Outside air is brough into building and distributed to the
servers (cooling )
❑ Exhaust air emitted by the servers is directed outside of the
building
❑ The cold outside air is mixed with air exhausted from the
server to maintain desirable level of heat and humidity for the
equipment
❑ Heat Recovery
❑ Energy is reduced by using heat pumps for removal of heat
produced by computing equipment
❑ This leads to energy savings as the head build up in the data
centre is reduced while diverting heat to needing offices and
building blocks
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13. Data center energy consumption
solutions
Storage consolidation
Solution: consolidating direct-
attached storage into network-
attached storage
Problem: around 27% of
energy used in data
centers are consumed by
storage units
14. Data center Space usage solutions
Virtualization
and Cloud
computing
Such solutions
help reduce
energy
consumption and
Carbon emission
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17. Benefits of virtualization
Pooling of Resource
High redundancy
High availability
Rapidly deployment of new servers
Easy of deployment
Reconfiguration of services while they are running
Optimization of physical resources
18. Cloud computing
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“The provisioning of services in a
timely (near on instant), on-
demand manner, to allow the
scaling up and down of
resources”**
VMWare
List one major drawback with cloud computing ?
19. Software As a Service (SAAS)
Software as a service (SaaS) allows users to connect to and use cloud-based apps
over the Internet. Common examples are email, calendaring and office tools (such as
Microsoft Office 365).
https://azure.microsoft
▪ Provision of software on a a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider.
▪ Internet is the platform for connecting and obtaining the service using a web
browser.
▪ PAAS stands for platform as a service
▪ IAAS stands for infrastructure as a service
20. SAAS benefits
1. IT costs can be trimmed across the enterprise
2. Risks can be mitigated
3. Improved management of IT talent
4. Faster go-live with short time-to-value interval can be realized
5. Minimal effort needed to plan and execute implementations
6. Additional hardware infrastructure is not required
7. Corporate standards and version compatibility are more easily ensured
8. Significant reduction in local resource allocation can be realized
9. Easier mobility and scalability
10. Capital expenditures are reduced
11. A simple, cost-effective upgrade path can be rolled out
12. Manufacturers can devote more focus to true core competencies (such as
manufacturing)
22. Solutions to printer's waste
Dispose of safety if it represents hazard
Recycle (send to factory)
Reuse – like refilling printer cartridges
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23. Benefits to the environment from the
adoption of E-commerce and E-business
Reduced travels by cars and other transportation means , leading to
smaller carbon footprint
Inventory requirements are lower ( space requirements and waste
production is less)
Paper-less environment
Reduced packaging
Availability of products in a digital form (digitization)
Reduction in energy consumption and cooling requirements
Reduced road congestion and accidents
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25. Sustainability quizzes
There are numerous sustainability quizzes that are
available online. These quizzes are aimed at educating
people on the concept of sustainability in general.
Completing a quiz usually take few minutes.
Quiz examples
BBC Sustainability quiz
How Sustainable Am I? - ProProfs Quiz
The Guardian Quiz: how much do you know about the
sustainable development goals?
26. Resources
Gartner Glossary (2020). Data Center. Retrieved from http://www.gartner.com/it-
glossary/data-center
Murugesan (2008) .Harnessing GreenIT: Principles and Practices. Retrieved from
http://www.pitt.edu/~dtipper/2011/GreenPaper.pdf
Koomey, J. & Naffziger,S. (2020). Miniaturization may be tough, but there's still
room to drive down power consumption in modern computers. Retrieved from
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/moores-law-might-be-slowing-
down-but-not-energy-efficiency
Energystar.gov(2020). Air-Side Economizer. Retrieved from
https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.datacenter_efficiency_econo
mizer_airside
Vmware (2020) . Virtualization Overview. Retrieved from
https://www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization.pdf
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27. Resources
Amazon.com (2020). Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Retrieved
from http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Singh, R. (2008 ). Virtualization: Fueling Green Data Centers. Retrieved from
https://www.slideshare.net/InteropMumbai2009/ramnish-singh-virtualization-
fueling-green-data-centers-2373419
Chaffey, D. (2011). Digital Business and E-commerce Management. Pearson
WSU (2020). WSU Energy Program. Retrieved from http://www.energy.wsu.edu/
Azure.microsoft.com (2020) . What is SaaS?. Retrieved from /
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/what-is-saas/