How Green is Your IT? | BTalk Australia

(9min 42) Your data centre is soaking up a huge part of your electricity bill. Can you cut costs and help save the environment? In today’s BTalk Australia Jose Iglesias, Vice President of Global Solutions at Symantec, says the answers is ‘yes’. Find out how when he talks to Phil Dobbie about software solutions that will deliver efficiencies on your current hardware.

Add your thoughts and experiences in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

View all BTalk Australia podcasts here.

Subscribe to BTalk Australia on iTunes.

• Today’s Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie and welcome to BTalk Australia. Today, green IT.

So what is green IT and how can your company be greener?  Jose Iglesias is the vice president of global solutions at Symantec. Jose, I suspect right now, being green is good but the real focus for a lot of people is the economy. So I’m sure a lot of people are saying, yes I’ll be green if it’s going to cut costs, but otherwise forget it. I suppose the two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive do they?

Jose Iglesias: No, you’re absolutely right, they’re mutually supportive. One of the things to keep in mind when you talk about green IT is the fact that energy cost is the second largest operational expense that IT has. We just concluded two weeks ago, a state of the datacentre study. This is something that we’ve done now several years in a row. And what came back from the 1600 companies that we asked was that the saving energy cost was the second most important line item that IT was handling this coming year, 2009

Dobbie: So would outdated gear, assorted equipment that’s five or ten years old, would that be contributing a lot?  If you were investing in new equipment would you find that you could save a lot?

Iglesias: Well you can. The challenge though is that you don’t have enough money to refresh all of your hardware gear at the same time and that’s where Symantec comes in. With our technology, we can work with not only new equipment, but also with existing equipment and so we can wrap the equipment environment with this software wrapper. I like to call it the green ribbon.

Dobbie: Right.

Iglesias: So that you can reduce the amount of energy being consumed, still keep the same service level agreements and be able to work with both existing equipment as well as new equipment that you’re purchasing.

Dobbie: Right. As a software solution on equipment which might still be five or ten years old. Is that what you’re saying?

Iglesias: Absolutely.

Dobbie: Right. And what sort of economies?

Iglesias: To be able to identify how much money you can save, we’ve actually built a return on investment calculator that allows us to be able to sit down with the customers to say, if you do this option it can save you this money, if you do this other option it can save you this other money. It doesn’t take much to do a return on investment around energy costs, also because you can piggyback on top of that; the savings of the hardware as well as the management cost that goes along with that. For example, storage. Rather than buying ten more of what you were buying before, buy less and so you’re able to dampen down the growth curve of equipment.

Dobbie: But we do have, don’t we, this huge appetite for storage of data. You’re saying that maybe a lot of that storage is just unwarranted. We’re doing it out of habit and perhaps we don’t need to do it.

Iglesias: Right, that could be part of it. Also how often do you find multiple people storing the same piece of information?  So rather than keeping multiple copies of the same thing, keep one unique copy and put pointers to it. And so when you start getting into things like with this particular technology is called de-duplication, you can implement de-duplication and we’ve demonstrated that by de-duplicating data, you can save anywhere from 67 to 1 to upwards of 400 to 1 depending on the type of environment you’re dealing with.

Dobbie: And probably getting a lot more integrity in your data as well, I would have thought I suppose, as an upside on that.

Iglesias: Absolutely and that becomes truly important, not only when you start being able to worry about things like keeping your intellectual property secure and all of that.

Dobbie: We’re talking a lot about having green credentials these days. A lot of it seems like common sense thought doesn’t it?  Is it just that the technology and particularly software technology has moved on or have we been a bit lapse in the way we’ve created our datacentres and how we’ve managed our data in the past?

Iglesias: My personal belief is a little bit of both. Part of the problem that’s always characterised by IT is that they’re always being asked to do a lot more with the same numbers of people. So that meant that the path of least resistance for IT was to throw more equipment at the problem. The other aspect to it is that technology, both software and hardware technology, has evolved and it keeps evolving every year. So that means some new capabilities are being delivered. I’ve described de-duplication, I mean that’s a new technology as of the last couple of years. We have other capabilities that can be deployed to, again, be able to demonstrate a way to save energy.

Dobbie: So part of the saving of course could be decommissioning servers. In fact, that’s a big part of it when we’re looking at electricity savings. The intention is you’re going to be turning some machines off I guess.

Iglesias: Right, the industry for the Intel AMD-based processors several years ago introduced a notion of virtualisation. Virtualisation is an old technology for a new platform basically. I mean, IBM invented virtualisation back in the 1970s and early ’80s. With the advent of the VMware a couple of years ago, they introduced the ability to create virtual machines on what’s called the X86 platform. That was a revolutionary new implementation of this new technology.

Dobbie: Now this might not be your area of expertise but, if we are decommissioning old pieces of kit, what about recycling?  Where does this old gear go?

Iglesias: That’s actually a really big problem for the industry. There’s a number of toxic chemicals that go inside of physical machines, not to mention the toxic materials that it took to build the machine to begin with. So that’s one main reason why our software implementation really is very critical because it goes after the root cause of the problem which is needing less equipment to begin with.

Dobbie: Yeah.

Iglesias: But back to your original question. The industry in certain countries around the world, have implemented legislation that drives consumers, “consumers” meaning like an enterprise customer or even you and I, to be able to get rid of their IT equipment responsibly so that it can be sent to what we called, e-recyclers, to be able to get the mercury out, get the lead out, get the salvage to get the parts that can be salvaged and so on.

Dobbie: So maybe this is a challenge as well for the Green Grid, which is an industry firm in the US which you’ve been involved in. What sort of work is the Green Grid doing and how successful has it been so far?

Iglesias: The Green Grid has been phenomenal. So Symantec was actually one of the charter members of the Green Grid when it had its first inaugural meeting in April last year. The whole effort of the Green Grid is to not only get the whole industry together to figure out how as an entirety we can reduce the amount of energy being consumed by IT, but also the materials and simple things, which are quite important measuring how do you as the consumer compare this machine versus this other manufacturer’s machine that does the same thing.

Dobbie: Which makes a lot of sense; we’re all very familiar on washing machines. We’re seeing that sort of star rating, so it makes a great deal of sense that it gets applied in the IT centre.

Iglesias: That’s right. But up until the Green Grid tackled the problem and developed a solution, there was no such way to measure usage and it was left up to the poor IT guy to kind of sit down with the piles of documentation which again was very un-green-like, they probably printed it out to do the comparison themselves.

Dobbie: Right, the world is changing very rapidly isn’t it?  In the right direction I think Jose and I guess that’s one benefit of the economic downturn is we’re going to be looking at our cost structures much more closely. Been a pleasure to talk to you today. Thanks so much for your time.

Iglesias: Thank you very much, and it’s been a pleasure for me too.