Global Action Plan's Green IT Debate

You may recall that environmental charity Global Action Plan established the Environmental IT Leadership Team (EITL), an advisory group of major ICT users looking to make the use of ICT more efficient, and that the EILT produced a report, released in December 2007, entitled An Inefficient Truth. If you haven't read it you should take a look here - it's worth a read. (I talked to Trewin Restorick, CEO of Global Action Plan and Chair of EITL earlier this year about the report for my research).

The view is that computer users are being swamped by a mixed bag of messaging from a range of ‘expert' companies offering green IT products, services and advice. An Inefficient Truth was an attempt to address the issue and Global Action Plan/EITL is now pulling together an expert panel to debate some of the questions facing IT professionals.

The event, in London on October 7th, will be a Question Time format with questions posed to a panel of hardware and software manufacturers and government representatives (MoD, HP, BT, Cisco, IBM, Sun, SOCITM). The aims is to enable IT users to get a better understanding of the environmental credentials of the main vendors, to provoke discussion and debate around areas of specific environmental concern and interest to IT users and to consider ways that the relationship between vendors, users and regulators can be better enhanced to promote greener IT solutions.

Apparently, to win a place at the event you need to send a question to the panel in advance to rebecca.haslam@globalactionplan.org.uk. But I hope they also let other IT suppliers in to hear what the users are asking, or publish the questions and answers. It seems a bit of a waste of time if only a diverse handful of vendors are there. It could be fascinating, though, and I would try to be there if I didn't have to be somewhere else.

CDP6 Responses

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has started to produce its analysis of the responses to its latest annual survey. Responses were due at the end of May and the results are published in a number of reports from September onwards.

Requests for response to the survey are sent out to companies around the world based on their presence on lists such as the FTSE Global 500, S&P 500 and local country equivalents - 1,550 companies provided some response this year. The questionnaire asks about views on the impact and opportunity of global warming, specifics around energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, forecasts and reduction targets. (See previous blogs for more information).

Anyway, the first reports have come out, covering the Global 500 and S&P (US) 500. Both have some coverage by industry sector, including Technology, Media and Telecoms. For the Global 500, CDP reports that "TMT (Technology, Media and Telecoms) companies are broadly in line with the Global 500 overall in terms of disclosure – they are slightly less likely than average to include emissions in their annual report, to disclose Scope 1 or Scope 2 emissions to CDP and to set targets, but slightly more likely than average to verify and forecast emissions. In terms of response quality the TMT sector is almost exactly in line with non-intensive (emissions) sectors overall".

The S&P 500 report, covering the US, was less favourable. CDP reported that "Overall, Technology, Media, and Telecommunications respondents perform below average on five key areas of disclosure". These areas were; including climate change issues in annual reports, disclosing greenhouse gas emissions, verifying emissions, disclosing emissions targets and disclosing emissions forecasts.

There are quite a range of companies in these reports and I hope to provide a more succinct analysis with my own interpretation in a later post. For now, though, it's worth reflecting on some of the companies that did and did not respond. It's clearly essential that companies report their emissions and targets (and views on climate change) in a standard format that can be published if they want to be seen as credible in their efforts to come to grips with climate change. And yet many still do not.

A quick look at the response that the CDP has defined as from the Software and Services sector shows that Autonomy, SAP, HCL, Micro Focus and Novell did not respond. Steria declined to participate and Autodesk, BMC, Compuware and Software AG answered the survey but requested that the information not be made public, which defeats the object somewhat.

Those that did respond (although the level of detail provided may vary) included Adobe, CA, Citrix, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Sage and Yahoo.

Data Centre Green Audit - just £2,500

Data centre consultancy Migration Solutions has launched a tool, called the Environmental Report and Audit (ERA), designed to give an all-round view of the environmental impact and performance of data centres.

Migration Solutions provides general consulting around data centres, including design and build, migration and operation. (I may be showing my age here, but when and why did a computer room become a data centre?). Anyway, they've come up with a pretty comprehensive tool to assess data centres on a number of environmental criteria, including facilities, layout, cooling, power used, efficiency, safety, operation, etc. The tool checks over 120 different aspects and comes up with a percentage score that can also be compared with previous audits (the company has done 20 so far). It also gives indications of actions to take to improve things.

The best thing about this tool is that it comes from a small, independent company with a wealth of experience in the market with no real axe to grind and they only charge £2,500 (they see it as a loss leader).

Alex Rabbetts, MD of Migration Solutions, who I met on Tuesday to talk about the ERP tool, pointed out that most companies couldn't fail to recoup the cost of the tool if they adopt the recommendations that come out of using it.

He did, though, express some disappointment that companies were only really looking to save money by using the tool, rather than out of environmental concern. It's a view I sympathise with, but I'm also confident that the impact of stakeholder concerns (customers, shareholders/investors, employees, etc) will trickle down organisations so that the environmental impact will become an end in itself. And don't forget, legislation is coming ...

Fujitsu Siemens Steams Ahead

Fujitsu Siemens has become the first company to ship IT products from China to Germany via the Trans-Eurasian railway. Although conceived as much for the flexibility and cost reduction it offers, using the railway makes a significant contribution to the company's efforts to cut carbon emissions across the product life cycle. The train journey generates less than 5% of the CO2 emissions of air freight at a quarter of the cost and is also a third faster than transport by sea.

The route crosses six countries and seven time zones and includes two changes of train - the operation is being co-ordinated by freight company DB Schenker and the various rail operators. The first delivery of 50 containers of IT products, including monitors and systems chassis, left Xiangtang, 700km north of Hong Kong, on September 19th and is expected to take 17 days to reach Germany. The monitors go to the FSC European distribution centre in Worms and the chassis assemblies to the factory in Augsburg.

The flexibility comes from the fact that whilst air freight between China and Germany takes only 2-3 days it's very expensive. By contrast, sea transport takes 25-30 days, which is a long time when stock levels and inventory values change daily. The train offers a compromise and the company anticipates that 5-15% of shipments will be moved from plane to train.

The Green benefit comes from the fact that transport from China to Germany by air generates 4,950 Kg CO2 emissions per tonne whilst the train is just 280Kg per tonne, so the potential savings are significant.

The rail route is not without its problems, though. Changes in the gauge of the track mean the train has to be changed a couple of times, getting through customs is no mean feat and security is an on-going concern (although GPS is being used to track the freight). The biggest problem is that in the winter temperatures can drop to -60C along the route, which is too extreme for this sort of equipment, so the railway is only effectively open to Fujitsu Siemens for eight months of the year. The company is looking into using containers that can withstand the low temperatures.

I recall that in a previous blog I said that FCS was losing the PR battle against its rivals in talking about how Green their operations and products are, but they've made up a lot of ground here. There's a blog of the journey which also shows the accumulating CO2 emissions saved (compared with air freight) as the train progresses. Also some great pictures from DB AG/DB Schenker.

It's nice to see an IT company taking the initiative in this way, but others will be queuing up to use the train. It won't be long before manufacturers across Europe will be looking for similar solutions to reduce emissions, supported by more complex and diverse supply chain and logistics IT systems. Solutions will need to be dynamic as routes succumb to regional temperature variations (as this does), even more so as the impact of global warming kicks in.

UK Nuclear Industry goes to France

In various reports and papers I've pointed out that a major reason that companies are looking to become more energy-efficient and to rely more on renewable sources is the increasing threat to energy security. The escalating cost is a large part of that, but so too is the over-reliance on gas and petrol supplies controlled by other countries, particularly where social and political events are more likely to interrupt the flow. This is the case for Western Europe, dependent on supplies from Russia delivered across a number of countries.

In that context it seems odd that the British Energy Group has today been sold to French government-owned Electricite de France (EDF).

There are lots of good reasons for the deal, not least that the UK will get overseas investment to help build a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK (EDF is the world's largest nuclear utility). The UK sorely needs more nuclear power, generally accepted to be the Greenest option available to bridge a potential enegy gap in the not-too-distant future (although Greenpeace would disagree). The British government also gets its 36% stake in the company back as a result of the sale and Centrica, the UK's largest energy supplier, is also negotiating to buy a 25% stake in what was British Energy.

But the bare facts are that British Energy, and now EDF, owns eight of the UK’s ten operational reactors, which probably includes all the sites for the next generation plants, and is being sold to a company 70% owned by the French state.

Now I'm not suggesting that the company will in any way interfere with the supply of energy into the UK. But all countries work in the best interests of their citizens and who knows where that may lead in the future. All you can say is that if a UK company attempted a deal in the other direction it would almost certainly be blocked by the French government. So we don't even start from a level playing field.

Green IT and the Credit Crunch

After a traumatic week which saw the money markets on the verge of meltdown, short-term economic fire fighting becomes a lot more important than long-term (end-of-the-world) environmental issues. The fate of the planet can wait, but only for so long

So how does Green IT come out of all this? Well, lets face it, the IT market as a whole is going to take a beating, particularly in more vulnerable sectors, and you can put financial services at the top of the list. You may have seen reports of the comment by Matt Bienfang, a senior research director of TowerGroup; “Between Bear, Lehman and Merrill you’re talking about 4-5% of the entire industry spend on technology”. Some of that will be recovered in the buy-outs, but you get the point. And of course there will be a knock-on impact in other sectors that can't raise money now.

In the UK it seems unlikely that there will be any real growth in the IT market in 2009 (after inflation). A lot will depend on the money markets this week - some stability is sorely needed. If there's worse news still to come then we're looking at a recession in the IT industry next year.

So what will the impact be on the Green IT sector? Well when times are bad in the IT industry several things tend to happen:

• Hardware purchases are postponed as companies make existing investments last longer. Good for the maintenance service providers but not for the sales of the more environmentally-friendly PCs and servers that have come onto the market in the last year or two (Energy Star/EPEAT). It's unlikely that the reduced energy use of the latest machines will be a sufficient incentive on their own to stimulate much in the way of purchases.

• There is a move to outsourcing/BPO. It's not just that it might be cheaper to let an outsourcer run all or part of your IT, it's the fact that the costs become fixed for a period of time and hence more easily managed. It's likely, though, that energy use/CO2 emissions will be an integral part of choosing the supplier. Clients have the ability to play suppliers off against each other and, for example, energy efficiency in data centres will be one increasingly important criterion for selection. (Even if the supplier takes the CO2 responsibility, the customer might still feel obliged to report the emissions under its own GHG Scope 3 declaration, particularly if it was part of a emissions reduction target). It's not just infrastructure outsourcing either, it goes all the way up to BPO contracts.

• One-off projects get postponed. New application implementations, a wholesale switch to SOA, etc. will be put off until there is more investment available. The projects that do go ahead will be those that bring a quick return on investment. In that respect the current high cost of energy is very much helping the Green IT cause. Saved energy costs will be a significant factor in decision-making, so a Greener logistics solution may well get the go-ahead as part of a plan to reduce transport costs.
  

• Finally, IT decisions are more closely controlled by the business when money is short. As we saw in the last industry slowdown, after the dot com bubble burst, the Finance Director had the last word in corporate IT spend. But the Finance Director also feels the pressure from customers, shareholders, investors, employees, etc. to become more environmentally friendly (and the impact it can have on corporate reputations and brand value) and may well put these less tangible benefits into the ROI mix when assessing a project.

So high energy costs will help keep the Green agenda alive over the next year or two. But in any case I believe the timing of this downturn (recession?) is not altogether bad for the Green IT market. Whilst the industry has a huge contribution to make in the long term to help prevent global warming, it was always going to take time for customers to accept the inevitable and invest real money in changing applications and processes to reflect future needs.

If energy prices stay high (and who's going to bet against it) then what we will see over the next year or two will be investment in methods to minimise energy costs. Outsourcing providers will be looking to drive down emissions to show a competitive advantage whilst there will be on-going investment in those Green IT projects that promise a quick ROI from energy reduction.

Meanwhile, climate change awareness will increase, stakeholder pressure will grow and legislation will start to kick in in Europe and the US, whilst Green IT investment will remain largely bottled up by the economic climate.

But when the economic outlook starts to improve there will be a rush to implement Green IT across the board. In fact, expect to see Green IT as a driving factor when we start coming out of this economic downturn. Those software and IT services companies that have been dragging their feet in developing their market offerings now have more time to get their act together before the flood gates open, because what has been a slowly growing trickle will be a flood in 18-24 months time.

But that's still some way off yet. For the moment it's a case of battening down the hatches.

Greenpeace Green Electronics Rankings

Greenpeace has released it's latest quarterly ranking of the 18 top manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones, TV's and games consoles according to their policies on toxic chemicals, recycling and climate change. The latest rankings are below.


When I reported the last rankings back in June I received some feedback from manufacturers expressing concern about the methodology and the focus of the rankings, so this time I talked to Greenpeace to get their perspective.

The assessment is based on the chemicals used in manufacture, responsibilities around recycling and the climate impacts of companies and products. It's also prioritised in that order - Greenpeace's initial concerns when it started the rankings were around toxic chemicals - energy issues were only added later - and the use of hazardous materials remains the deciding factor if all else is equal.

The concerns that I received were around the fact that energy efficiency claims had to be published on a web site, but it wasn't clear how this should be done, which left it open to some gamesmanship. I believe this issue has been clarified and Greenpeace also pointed out that the data used is a spin off from the information reported to the EPA in the US for Energy Star rankings.

Another issue was around companies making promises that they don't carry out, e.g. to reduce the use of a particular chemical. Whilst Greenpeace does do some testing itself (and has had some success) I guess the resources are limited to check up on a wide range of products from many vendors. The organisation did say, though, that manufacturers report back if they feel their competitors are not living up to their promises!

A third issue was around the use of alternatives for chemicals that Greenpeace wants banned - there are issues around finding suitable alternatives without impacting other aspects such as product safety. Greenpeace pointed out that there can be alternative solutions, rather than just replacement chemicals, and there have been some innovative designs already to get round problems.

This is a good effort from Greenpeace and should help push the market to be more environmentally friendly. You can argue about whether they've got the priorities right, but not about the process itself, provided:

- there is a level playing field, i.e. everyone knows what information Greenpeace needs and how to provide it

- manufacturers are open and honest (and it looks like they'll increasingly get caught out if they aren't)

- the rankings are clear. Companies are scored out of a total of 51 and if there's a tie the score on chemical use takes priority over recycling and recycling takes priority over climate change. It's all on the Greenpeace web site somewhere, but it could be made a lot clearer.

PCs - Off or On?

In a commercial setting turning off PCs can save significant amounts of energy and hence carbon emissions, but it may not always be the most effective solution across an organisation.

Purdue University, Indiana, is trying to ensure its PCs are switched off, but when they're on and idle, even if just for a few minutes, they're used for other work such as research jobs. It means that the university's computer resources (more than 20,000 computers) are used more efficiently and reduces the number that are powered up at any one time.

It's achieved through open-source software, called Condor, which comes from the University of Wisconsin. Purdue is going to make the software available to all of its employees so they can also connect to the system.

A reminder that lateral thinking (or the oft cited 'holistic' approach) is needed to achieve Green goals effectively.

Short REACH List

The EU Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has said that the first list of hazardous chemicals to be submitted for EU regulatory approval under the new EU REACH regulation on chemicals and their safe use may only contain 12 substances.

Public interest groups and NGOs jointly drafted a REACH SIN (Substitute It Now) list of some 270 substances to be substituted in priority under the REACH regulation. The Member State Committee (MSC) of the ECHA, which is in charge of making the proposals for identification of these substances, has so far identified just 16 for inclusion on the first list. However, the committee has been unable to agree on four of the 16, so the final list, to be published in mid-October, might go down to 12.

These first candidates will be the ones put on a priority list to go through special scrutiny before they are authorised. The priority list will be drafted based on the candidate list and is due to be published in June 2009.

The shortness of the list was blamed on the fact that the process was just starting, the new heavy administrative procedures and scarce resources available for testing chemicals. Meanwhile, a member of the SIN list advisory committee said that all the substances on the SIN list "are dangerous and deserve to be on the candidate list of REACH".

This seems to be another case of too much to do and too little time. There are clearly a lot of chemicals out there that are damaging us and our environment and were best got rid of, but the decision is not always black and white. I've spoken to hardware manufacturers who feel they are being forced to drop the use of some chemicals when there is no known (or tested) alternative, with the result that the use of equipment could become less safe. They want to conform, but they also want the issues to be aired, which seems fair enough.

So I can see why this is a slow process, but perhaps we just need to cut some short-term corners for our long-term well being.

The Carbon Trust's UK Success

The Carbon Trust has reported that it has helped UK businesses save £1bn and cut carbon emissions by 17 million tonnes since its inception in 2001. The organisation was set up by the Government to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy by helping organisations reduce emissions and develop commercial low carbon technologies.

Businesses working with the Carbon Trust apparently cut their carbon footprint by around two million tonnes last year, up half a million tonnes compared to the previous year. An important part of the success has been the support for smaller businesses. In 2007/08, the organisation provided £40m of support to SMEs and since 2005 it has helped smaller businesses to save almost one million tonnes of carbon and implement more than £100 million of direct cost savings.

The Carbon Trust is important in the UK because of the way it spreads good practice. The problem is if this advice becomes diluted. Several of the IT services players are now providing advice to the market on carbon emissions based on their own experiences which were themselves helped by the Carbon Trust. But companies are different and what works for an IT supplier may not work for its clients.

The Carbon Trust can't be everywhere, but there are a number of specialist consultancies that can provide the environmental expertise required for a holistic view. The IT players would do well to partner with them. That's particularly true of the SME market, where the large IT services players have never done well at the best of times.

Online CSR Transparency

Research from Brigham Young University and KDPaine & Partners has attempted to measure the transparency of CSR web sites of Fortune 50 Corporations. The general conclusion was that stakeholders were not involved enough (or at least it wasn't clear that they were involved) and there was little possible interaction with the CSR web sites, which made them mainly PR exercises. But the research did say that using standards developed by third party groups made reporting more transparent.

It seems to me that the only reason for having CSR reports is to make it possible to compare a company with its peers. If you're choosing a supplier, company to invest in or to work for then you want to know how companies compare, particularly in the same industry. To do that, everyone needs to be measuring the same thing. So the standards developed by the likes of the CDP are all-important. Preferably performance should also be verified by a third party, but in the case of this survey only 14% of those that included numerical reporting said they had been checked out by someone else.


Of course to make it meaningful the data should be in context, i.e. against targets, competitors, over time, etc. and this is where the most disappointing results were, as the chart shows. Organisations really need to think about what the CSR reports are for.

The net result of the research, a full copy of which is here, is a ranking of the Fortune 50 CSR web sites based on a scorecard that covered the use of technology, useful information, accountability, involvement and openness. HP came out top, Dell second and IBM was in 12th place.

My only reservation about this research is that points were awarded for the sheer length of a CSR report, which is not necessarily a good thing. As I noted in the last Green IT Report, HP’s on-line Global Citizenship Report ran to 180 printable pages - lets hope no one printed it.

Sustainable Economic Theory

For those of you interested in the long term economic implications of reducing our use of fossil fuels, there's an interesting paper from the Global Development and Environment Institute.

The problem is whether economic growth can continue without also increasing the use of fossil fuels. As the paper puts it "While it is theoretically possible to conceive of economic growth being “de-linked” from fossil fuel consumption, any such de-linking would represent a drastic change from economic patterns of the last 150 years".

It's an interesting paper - you can read the whole thing here - but to quote the abstract:

"To achieve a low-carbon path requires population stabilisation, limited consumption and major investments in environmental protection and social priorities such as public health, nutrition, and education. Macroeconomic theory must be adapted to reflect these new realities."

The paper proposes a reclassification of macroeconomic variables to distinguish between those categories of goods and services that can expand over time, and those that must be limited to reduce carbon emissions. "This reformulation makes it clear that there are many possibilities for environmentally beneficial economic expansion. New forms of Keynesian policy oriented towards ecological sustainability, provision of basic social needs such as education and health care, and distributional equity can provide a basis for a rapid reduction in carbon emissions while promoting investment in human and natural capital."

It brings home the point that sustainability, at least in some views (which I agree with), will not just mean a modification of industry practices but a complete re-think of economies and growth.

Google all at Sea

I couldn't resist the headline, but if anything it's just the reverse.

You may recall a blog back in January about a US start-up company with plans to launch a fleet of ship-based data centres. A total of 50 were planned, with half based around the US coast and the rest in ports around the world. Power from on-shore was to be supplemented by the ships’ own bio-diesel run generators with sea water used to cool the air-conditioning units and waste heat used to warm the ships’ accommodation.

I haven't heard any more about the plan, but Google has seen the potential and had a patent approved in the US around the means to power floating data centres.


According to the patent the objective is to provide data centre and telecommunications facilities quickly and flexibly, given the problems of getting access to power, data connections and cooling water, but it also has big implications in environmental and energy savings.

The idea is to provide data centres on moored ships. Energy is captured from the wave or tidal motion of the water to create power for the equipment and cooling pumps. There are a variety of options as to how the power will be generated and used, including the possibility of the data centres being on shore and receiving power or cooling water from floating systems.


I've attached a couple of the diagrams that are lodged with the patent, but if you're interested go and have a look at the patent application.

The Impact of the Sustainability Agenda on Mid-Sized Companies

The concern about sustainability issues is reaching down to mid-sized companies, according to some recent research by IBM.

IBM's global CEO study, which had 1,130 responses from 40 countries, showed that these companies see significant changes in market factors, skills requirements and regulatory compliance in the coming years. The problem is that whilst 86% anticipate substantial change, only 57% have had success in managing that change in the past.

In order to address the changes the companies are investing in their businesses to face the challenges. The most frequently cited areas for investment are growth through globalisation, customer service for increasingly informed and demanding customers and increased social responsibility activities.

On the CSR front, the view was that customer expectations around CSR are increasing and it will play an important role in differentiating suppliers in the future. Corporate reputation is seen as very important among informed customers who often make decisions based on corporate policies and records.

These mid-sized companies plan to increase investment in CSR by 34% over the next three years. Based on the prior success rate they quoted they are going to need some help. The question is, how are IT services companies going to get this business? This is a market where alliances and partnerships, particularly with the small, specialist environmental consultancies, will be vital.

Google - Chrome or Green?

Unless you've been asleep for the last week you must have read about Google's launch of its web browser, Chrome. It's had a mixed reception - see Holways Hotviews for the reaction of one of the UK's best known analysts (and my ex mentor)

Chrome is part of Google's plans to take over the world, as most 10-year-olds want to do (Google also celebrated its birthday at the weekend). You will have seen the various other add-ons Google has available with its searches, including Google Docs (documents, spreadsheets, etc), and if you receive these blogs by email (as many of you do) most are sent via Feedburner, another Google company.

There's a big story hear about the challenge to Microsoft by moving desktop applications online, covered by many papers over the weekend, but I'm more interested in the Green aspects.

The question is whether it is Greener to adopt Google's online approach. And the answer seems to me to be - it depends who you are. Lets look at three scenarios:

- Home PC use. Using free online applications is appealing to the home user simply on the basis of cost. The advertised price of any personal computer doesn't truly represent the outlay if a fully-featured office suite is added. But does using online software reduce the resources needed on home PCs? On the face of it, yes. But at the same time we are also increasingly seeing the home PC becoming the hub of an entertainment system for lots of audio/visual entertainment (film, TV, radio, YouTube, Facebook, etc, etc). With these sorts of applications available on the machine the resource needed and the power consumption are not going to be significantly impacted by whether documents and spreadsheets are driven by the PC or online.

- Corporate machines. For the foreseeable future I believe corporations will want to retain control of all office applications within their own IT operations, for compatibility reasons if nothing else. In any case, they have the capability to go thin client, which would probably provide even greater gains than online applications.

- SMEs. Small and medium enterprises must be the prime user group, since online applications can significantly reduce in-house costs. Here there could be a real Green benefit, allowing for the use of much simpler, devices in terms of processing and storage capabilities and hence less power-hungry (either in use or in manufacture). That's particularly true for laptop users (and more and more SMEs are moving to laptops), since it also provides easy access to office applications from any location as WiFi hot spots expand.

So there is potential for Google's offerings to help save the planet (and there's no argument that Google itself is doing it's share). It does rest on two assumptions, though. Firstly, that through economies of scale it is more power efficient for Google to manage the applications. And secondly, that the companies that use online applications are sure that the communications systems and providers they use are resilient enough to ensure that online applications are always available. Climate change will bring with it significant disruption and the recent spate of hurricane's hitting the Eastern Pacific are a reminder.

The I-O Case for Thin Client

The I-O Corporation provides thin client technology so it's not surprising that the company is pushing its solutions as a Green alternative to PCs.

I-O claims that its Pro|Edge thin clients consume 1/16th of the power of standard desktop PCs - the company's table below gives some examples.


To be fair, the company also quotes the Fraunhafer Institute, which apparently conducted a study that showed that if a medium-sized enterprise with 300 workstations switched 75% of them to thin clients they could save more than 148 tons of CO2 over five years (equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf circling the earth 27 times - it seems that these sort of car-equivalents are the only way we can understand the quantities of emissions).

Of course a lot depends on what's going on at the server end, but this isn't discussed in any detail in the I-O paper, except to say that virtualisation is making the client-server process more efficient. But you really need to take a holistic view across the solution.

Cray's New Cooling Technology

Cray, the supercomputer company, has announced a new liquid cooling technology that it claims will allow computers to run faster than ever whilst still saving energy. It will begin shipping later this year.

The issue is that CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioner) units are pretty inefficient at the best of times and for high-end computers take a lot of power and space. Chilled water in the cabinets is better, and Cray's solution uses chilled water, but apparently much less of it. (For those who want more technical details, see the press release).

To quote from the press release "The ECOphlex technology is designed to be 'room air neutral', meaning that the temperature of the air entering the system is roughly the same as the temperature of the air exiting the system."

It's nice to see even the specialist manufacturers doing their bit. (Cray also points out that its cabinets have been re-usable for some time, so there's no need for wholesale replacement - not that supercomputers get upgraded that often).