The document discusses the importance of IT sustainability and its environmental impacts, including the contributions of the ICT sector to carbon emissions. It explores strategies for improving energy efficiency in data centers, such as innovative cooling solutions, virtualization, and cloud computing, as well as the benefits of SaaS for businesses. Additionally, it highlights how e-commerce and e-business can contribute positively to environmental sustainability by reducing transportation needs and waste.

1. Contemporary Issues in Information Systems
Adil Fathelrahman 2017 - 2030

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
4

5. A Holistic Approach to Green IT

6. 6

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 ?
9

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
10

11. Data Centers issues
11
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
12

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
14

15. Servers Virtualization
15
The term
virtualization broadly
describes the
separation of a
resource or request
for a service from
the underlying
physical
delivery of that
service.
Vmware

16. 16

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
18
“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)

21. Printing technologies
Contaminant Waste
Code
Regulatory
Threshold
Contaminant Waste
Code
Regulator
y
Threshold
Barium
Benzene
Chromium
Carbon
tetrachloride
Methyl ethyl
ketone
D005
D018
D007
D019
D035
100.0 ppm
0.5 ppm
5.0 ppm
0.5 ppm
200.0 ppm
Silver
Trichloroethyl
ene
Vinyl chloride
D011
D039
D043
5.0 ppm
0.5 ppm
0.2 ppm
21
Hazard materials
MATERIAL SAFETY DATA SHEET- HP Inkjet printer

22. Solutions to printer's waste
Dispose of safety if it represents hazard
Recycle (send to factory)
Reuse – like refilling printer cartridges
22

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
23

24. Governments efforts
24

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
26

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/