Green IT UK

The Environmental Effects of Printing

2010-05-21T12:19:00.001+01:00

Global Action Plan are partnering with the University of East London in delivering an environmental behaviour change programme surrounding staff printing. This project is being funded by the JISC who do a great job supporting research projects in UK Universities.

One of the interesting things about the project is that we are looking at communicating more of the environmental costs of printing to UEL staff.

Most people are aware of the destruction of forestry involved in traditional logging operations. Up to 42% percent of the global wood harvest goes to the paper and pulp industry (Abromovitz and Mattoon, Worldwatch Paper: Paper Cuts, p. 20, 1999). UEL has already taken a great proactive step in using recycled paper across the campus which significantly reduces the number of trees required to be harvested. This means less pressure on forests and the species which rely on them.

What people are less aware of are the other environmental effects the paper and pulp industry has.

Paper production is a large consumer of water, due to soaking of the pulp fibers. In OECD countries the industry was the single largest industrial consumer of water (OECD Environmental Outlook, p. 218) The waste water then has a variety of chemicals in it, and this takes further processing to remove, not all of it can be and different countries have different levels of environmental legislation controlling this.

Paper and pulp production is also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, being the third greatest industrial greenhouse gas emitter in the OECD (OECD Environmental Outlook, p. 218). This is not including energy use in the running the printers. Much of the energy used running printers is as they are sitting idle overnight, on weekends and holidays. Even those which go into standby can still consume a significant amount, and not all do. Xerox estimated printers were only in use 1-2% of the time.

Then we come to the manufacturing and disposal of printers. Much of the energy a printer will ever use has been expended in its manufacture. A range of substances are mined and extracted in its complex machinery, including substances from places in developing countries which don't always have good environmental or labour standards. They are then transported large distances due to the globalised manufacturing process. There are also problems with the model of production, especially cheap desktops, where due to the main revenue being from cartridge sales, the printers are priced at disposable levels, making repair much less cost effective than replacement. Many go to land fill eventually, contributing to a global e-waste problem the UN described as a "mountain of e-waste", much of it ending up being disposed of in the third world, often with a complete absence of environmental or labour concerns.

Hundreds of millions of printer cartridges are purchased every year, and less than half of the cartridges themselves are reused or recycled (Infotrends 2009). Even those that are returned to refilling depots are often not economically viable to refill and end up in land fill. The cartridges themselves also use a range of chemicals in their manufacture, which leach out into the environment if not disposed of properly. They also contribute to the worlds growing e-waste problem.

There are other aspects as well, pollution, paper packaging, transport, toxics from ink and toner, all of which need to be considered. Taken together, if we can print less, print double sided or two to a page more often, share a printer with colleagues, use more environmentally sensitive paper and print equipment, we can reduce our ecological footprint, without effecting our quality of life.

Like many aspects of our lives, there are complex environmental consequences to our printing behaviours we need to consider in our actions. The project to make printing more environmentally friendly at UEL will have positive benefits on our environment, far beyond UELs campuses. This is why as an environmental charity Global Action Plan is happy to be involved in helping UEL take this important initiative.

Dematerialisation explained

2010-02-23T13:41:00.004+00:00

Dematerialisation

I wanted to explain dematerialisation, because its a bit of Green IT jargon, the meaning of which may not be immediately apparent. I don't like jargon generally, it excludes people not "in on it" from understanding the debate, but seeing as it's part of the lexicon of Green IT we'll continue using it.

Dematerialisation is the process of changing material processes into forms with reduced resource requirements. Using a "word processor", as they used to be called when there was competition in the market, was a form of dematerialisation. Documents could be read, edited, shared, reviewed and stored all using a fraction of the physical space of non digital methods. The materials being reduced were paper, filing cabinets, office space, couriers etc. This was the basis of the much heralded "Paperless Office" of the 1980's. Unfortunately office paper use has doubled since this time with the rise of an information rich culture, email and cheap printers, however the idea remains a solid environmental and efficiency proposition and there are many examples of effective moves away from paper based systems.

The greenhouse gas emission comparison of purchasing music from a store and downloading it from the web was studied by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University. They found that downloading it reduced emissions from between 40 and 80 percent depending on how the user purchased the music. Travelling to a store and purchasing a packaged item is more carbon intensive than ordering a package from a distributor online. We've gone another step now, with no packaging involved whatsoever, instead downloading it directly onto the device that will be playing it (this benefit is lessened if you then go and burn it to a CD anyway). The tiny music playing devices commonplace now would have seemed impossibly futuristic to the record owners of only a couple of decades ago. The interesting thing is that downloading digital music isn't generally done by consumers for environmental reasons; a new way of consuming has dramatically reduced it's footprint purely through efficiency and consumer demand.

This is the "zone" of Green IT, using IT to make things more efficient and lowering their environmental impact.

The UK has been pushing its online tax return system and tax payers have been resounding in their positive response to the programme. Online filings rose by over 50% in 2008/2009 to encompass 5.8 million tax returns, over two thirds of the total filed. According to figures based on the WWF report "Saving the Climate @ The Speed of Light", the UK has saved a total of 5882 tonnes of carbon from this initiative. It's not only obvious things like the printing and posting of the tax returns which is reducing carbon, it's not needing armies of office workers and support staff managing typing in figures from hand written tax returns. The end result, a cheaper, faster and more environmentally friendly service.

Dematerialisation has completely changed modern offices and many business process along with it, and no doubt we still have a long way to go. Films are already being trialed and soon no doubt the DVD case will be less ubiquitous in our living rooms, instead films will predominantly be downloaded and stored on our set top boxes. From that point, once networks become reliably fast enough, we won't even bother storing them at home, they'll be stored on the computers of service providers and streamed to us on demand.

Books are a material good that has thus far, despite numerous attempts, resisted dematerialisation. Part of the convenience is there, you can store thousands of books in a small amount of space, search them, go to exact places at the flick of a switch, even have them read themselves to you in broken American-English. What hasn't quite been conquered is the equivalent experience of reading words on a page to the eye. This hasn't been a solvable problem technically so far, but as large screen mobile phones are becoming the norm, I note people using them more to read during moments of downtime. Perhaps in the not too distant future the cultural change of omnipresent mobile phones will overcome the technical obstacle of the pleasure of the printed word. Technology is also catching up after many attempts, readers like the Kindle are starting to catch on, and they will no doubt continue to improve.

So perhaps books will become like CD's and DVD's, more absent from our homes and shelves, telling those who enter our space a little bit less about ourselves, whilst this cultural space of self expression is filled instead by mechanisms such as online social networking. Enough philosophising...

How to identify dematerialisation opportunities

Dematerialisation is going on all around us and no doubt there is still a long way to go. Identifying dematerialisation opportunities can be a huge efficiency and environmental move forward for your business, and can also be a lucrative business proposition.

The first step is to create a map/report of all the ways in which your business (or the part of the business you have influence over) touches the environment. An environmental map/report is useful for many reasons, and can form the basis for an Environmental Management System like ISO14001 further down the track. It should identify where external resources/materials are pulled into, and where are they being pushed out of, your organisation. Your facilities/purchasing department should be a great help here, what you are spending money is a good place to find environmental impacts.

Next you need to approximate the negative environmental effects of each of the areas of impact you've identified. Try to get at the hidden impacts of your processes. For example we all know paper uses trees, but there are also a lot of chemicals used in it's manufacture, as well as water, all of this adding up to a toxic industry and one of the most green house gas intensive on the planet. Environmental footprints can extend out forever though, so you'll need to limit the "scope" of your footprint somewhere to make your task manageable. (Learn more about scopes as they relate to carbon emissions) To begin with concentrate on energy and resources you use directly and extend outwards in later phases.

You should then add less tangible but still important ways in which you could have an effect on the environment. Could you potentially get involved in dematerialisation beyond your current business remit, could you have influence over other organisations or the public in some area of dematerialisation? You may even come up with some potential business opportunities.

Once you've established this "map" of your organisations current and potential environmental impact, which as mentioned is useful far beyond dematerialisation, you then want to ascertain how much control you have over each of these elements. Are they in your domain, your suppliers etc, are there regulatory requirements you have to conform with etc? Hopefully you'll be starting to create a picture of what your major environmental impacts are, what you have the direct power to change, where you have influence over suppliers and delivery partners etc, and where change will be hard or impossible.

Your next step will be to figure out where your efforts can be best utilised in the initial phase of your dematerialisation programme. Often some obvious areas for dematerialisation will make themselves apparent. Marketing materials, business travel, conferences, meetings, accounts, internal communications, document archives etc.

One you've identified a handful of target areas, the next step is researching best practices in each of them. Try to get an idea of how other organisations have used dematerialisation to reduce their environmental impact across their businesses. If an impact is through your suppliers, see if there are ways they or their competitors could provide less resource intensive services by the smart use of information technology.

The final and perhaps most important step is brain-storming. You want to get people in your organisation thinking as creatively as possible about how you can change your practises as a business to remove some of the material impacts internally and externally. As mentioned before potential business or philanthropic activities can come out of this phase.

Dematerialisation for your organisation will be an ongoing process as ideas and technologies change. As the examples listed at the start of this post show, this is being done successfully all around us. If your organisation can be a leader in dematerialisation, it will give you the opportunity to create competitive advantage, to make your business more efficient and to reduce your environmental impact.

Looking at the bigger picture, if we are to try to maintain or even improve living standards, whilst reducing our environmental impact as a society, dematerialisation is going to play an important part. A knowledge and skills based society, where we decouple the economy from the environment, valuing experiences over things, has the potential to provide us with a more fulfilled and ecologically sustainable culture. Hopefully you and your organisation can find a way to play its part.

For more information about dematerialisation (or dematerialization in US English) :

Wikipedia has a good brief introductory article (as ever)
The Smart2020 report has a section on dematerialisation

Carbon Footprinting and IT

2010-01-20T15:55:00.001+00:00

Taiwan, Sweden and the UK governments have all recently made indications that they may move towards labelling goods with embedded carbon statistics.

Obviously such labelling is an idea who's time will shortly come, and as further evidence of this it was the topic of the Green Monday Sustainable ICT table I chaired last week.

How reliable is embedded carbon as a purchasing indicator though? With something like a packet of crisps usage isn't a large factor in its carbon lifecycle. Electronic goods are a very different proposal as energy usage is a large portion of their total footprint. Because of the complexity of the components, computer equipment often moreso.

The Carbon Footprint of a Server

Let's take your average server as an example. Almost every manufacturer would tell you that their server is energy efficient, but what does this mean? At the moment there is no standard comparison between manufacturers, and even if there were, like processors a few years ago, designers could optimise for performance in benchmarking tests which might not reflect real work usage.

Manufacturers are always going to try to tweak results to favour themselves and if they didn't their marketing departments would no doubt have a word to say. Recently at the Green Monday table, a data centre manager said that in his experience of purchasing machines, manufacturers could not be trusted to rate their own products, and the only way to really tell was to plug them in through an energy monitor and do your own comparisons. OK if you have the budget and time for such comparisons, however not everyone does.

Servers come in a wide range of profiles as well, a 64 processor machine is going to be difficult to compare against an array of individual machines. What is the expected lifetime of the components in a machine, and given that longevity how upgradeable is it? These things also need to factor into the carbon footprint of a server.

Very different from a packet of crisps

Unlike a refridgerator which is basically just on and doing a well defined job, and can be rated on energy consumption and cooling efficiency, computers run many different applications, at varying times, often simultaneously, many of them bespoke. All this makes comparisons difficult. If you are running a standard small office maybe you can make educated guesses, but for data centre operators it's not so easy.

The standard measure for data centre efficiency PUE doesn't even try to do this. It just compares the energy which is used by the computers in the data centre, as opposed to that used on lighting, cooling etc. This could be a rough indication of the efficiency of the lighting and cooling systems, or alternatively the inefficiency of the computing systems, but it's not telling us much more. What we'd really like to know is bang for buck, how much useful activity as defined by whatever computational thing we are trying to do, do we get for a given amount of energy expended. A computer often uses between 60 and 70% of its energy even at low utilisation levels just doing housekeeping like keeping disks spinning and memory juiced up, increasing computation doesn't add proportionately that much to it's energy use, so utilisation is key. This is why virtualisation is such a big win, using as much of the resources of individual machines as possible. Gartner have come up with PPE as a better statistic, based on "rack density levels, server utilization levels, and energy consumption". Again it's flawed, rack density doesn't tell us too much and restricts airflow, server utilization doesn't necessarily measure useful work, and energy consumption is only worthwhile if it is compared to useful work, but Gartner's measure is an improvement on PUE, and let's hope they further refine it.

The Carbon Footprint of Programme

So different software services vary dramatically with the profile of memory, cpu and disk which they use, even when performing similar functions. We can use some rules of thumb, we can profile for different classes of applications, we can optimise the hardware of different servers for different tasks to get maximum energy efficiency, so there is much useful we can do there.

What about the programmers though, so far they've gotten off lightly but perhaps we should be carbon footprinting their work too. Once upon a time, programmers worked with limited resources, and tried to tune their applications in every way possible. That has all changed in the latest generation of programmers. During my IT degree at QUT, my lecturer John Hynd told us in one of our first programming lectures, that Moore's Law meant we shouldn't worry about efficiency. (He also told us only one in three of us would get through the course successfully so best of luck to the other two guys whatever you are doing). Computers were cheap, programmers were expensive and in short demand, everywhere in the world apaprently needed billions of programmers, and of course then the dot com bubble burst and the entire language and economics around IT changed.

Now we are running services, and are an intergral part of every business, no longer only in the role of a differentiator or competitive advantage, so cost is important. Inefficient programming can mean more servers and more energy consumed. A good programmer who programmes for efficiency is going to understand trade offs between design and performance, but many don't and this needs to be addressed. Some universities are changing the way they teach, the University of East London is looking to integrate concepts of Green IT in their teaching programme, though whether that filters through to the programming classes we shall wait and see.

There is also the concept of capacity management, rightsizing resources. Programmers and administrators tend to overspecify equipment as a matter of course. If programmers can do a better job of understanding the usage of underlying resources, they can better understand the physical resources which will be required to house them.

Given a programmer does all this diligently, will we see software packages with carbon footprints on them or programmers with carbon aware stampes on their resumes? Probably not, but who knows.

Summary

Some IT equipment is going to be hard to carbon footprint, too many variables, hardware and software configurations, come in to play. The embedded carbon in it's manufacture is more tangible. We need global standards for this sort of measurement, and either wide industry uptake or legislation mandating it before it can become universally useful, but it could provide a comparison for purchasing decisions.

For Home PCs we could provide some useful guidance to users. Profiling a PCs idling energy usage, standard energy usage running web browsers and office apps, and energy usage running at full tilt with 3D immersive graphics intensive applications. Users can pick the profile that suits them and it would help them make the right decision about the PC for them.

All in all perhaps taxation is a better strategy, something like removing VAT and replacing it with a carbon tax. This would remove the need to understand the footprint from users and factor it into the price of goods. Who will do the carbon accounting and what standards will they use is a question left to be answered.

At the moment carbon footprinting is purely voluntary, if you are a potato crisp company that measures its footprint and finds it is greater than your competitor, do you work to reduce it or just not publish it. There are a lot of questions yet to be answered at the end of the carbon affluent age. We have to work these things out somehow though, and if IT wants to think of itself as a forward looking industry, it needs to be leading the effort.

The Green Touch Initiative and Network Efficiency

2010-01-15T12:00:00.004+00:00

It is with some interest I noticed the Green-Touch (http://greentouch.org) initiative released by a consortium let by Alcatel-Lucent this week.

Computer networks are increasingly becoming the infrastructure of our society. Current estimates of the carbon footprint of computer networks put it equivalent to 50 million cars or the footprint of every car in the France and Russia combined. As we move processes over to them such as telephony and entertainment, along with near future initiatives like smart energy grids and network enabled appliances, networks are going to need to be larger and therefore more energy intensive. That is without a leap forward in the underlying network technology.

Bell Labs and Shannon's Law

Alcatel-Lucent own Bell Labs, one of the great centers of historical IT innovation. Researchers at Bell Labs have a long list of nobel prize winners amongst them, and are responsible for many revolutionary computer innovations such as Unix and the C Programming language. It was one of their researchers Claude Shannon who was the founder of digital information theory. He also did calculations as to the theoretical limits of the transfer of digital communications.

Using Shannon's work, researchers at Bell Labs have calculated that the theoretical maximum efficiencies of networks could be increased up to 10,000 times from their current capacities. Biting off a chunk of this, Alcatel-Lucent have set a goal of having a model for a network 1,000 times more energy efficient by 2015.

That Alcatel-Lucent have set up a consortium to try to achieve this is an excellent step forward. With the list of supporters including research institutions hoping for innovations and grants, alongside telephony companies hoping for dramatic energy cost reductions and network improvements, there is hope for some traction for the initiative. There is a large absence of other large network vendors from the consortium, such as Cisco etc, the presence of which would give the project a less commercial and marketing feel.

Another question hanging over this initiative is whether it will be about energy efficiency, or about making networks faster and claiming that reduces their carbon footprint. Granted, a network running 1000 times faster is going to be more efficient assuming the underlying traffic and usage doesn't change, however network bandwidth has been improving for some time, and no one has tried to claim that the driver has been energy efficiency. If Alcatel-Lucent are leading a consortium which has nothing in mind rather than further throughput increases, we can quite confidently label this as green wash over business as usual practises.

Cynicism aside, from our reading of the press released by the consortium, it seems they are genuinely going to focus on energy efficiency, which is an idea who's time has come and should be supported.

Areas for network efficiency gains

Technical people will of course be asking, where are the savings going to come from? They are short on detail but brainstorming a little there are some areas of inefficiencies which could pretty immediately be addressed.

The global information superhighway (haven't used that term in ages :) was built to withstand a nuclear attack. This means redundancy, to route to any given point can take many different paths, if a piece of equipment fails you take another way to your destination. Currently all this equipment is on all the time, 24/7, regardless of utilisation rates, so simply turning them off when not being used could result in large energy reductions. We can use the networks themselves and capacities similar to Wake-On-Lan, in order to turn off equipment which isn't in use. Why be powering a network at trivial utilisation that is mainly there for redundancy, when it can be powered on when it is needed? We see energy efficiencies gains of over 40% implementing stand-by on other computing infrastructure and there seems no reason putting this logic into existing networks wouldn't see similar gains.

Wireless technology

Work was done in this area by the University of Rochester with specific application to the military. If people are carrying the equipment and batteries, suddenly energy efficiency becomes a major issue. That is a theme underlying much of this, that energy efficiency just hasn't been on the radar until now, but with the era of cheap energy and consequence-less over-usage falling behind us increasingly efficiency will be on the agenda.

Most wireless hubs are consuming power 24/7 like the rest of their network counterparts, polling the empty space constantly to see if anyone wants to connect, most of them don't even have an obvious on/off switch. You can go and turn down the polling now on your wireless hub to something sensible like every 1.5 seconds and reduce it's energy use, but the manufacturers can do more. Being able to remotely power up/down your home wireless hub/router from a pc would be a good start using existing technology and saving consumers money. Further on a smart house/business which has a concept of whether it is occupied or not could turn off all wireless equipment when not in use.

The current way we broadcast wireless is also inefficient by its very nature. You may be sitting three meters from your hub, yet it is broadcasting to every home in the vicinity. As well it broadcasts in all directions simultaneously, regardless of whether this is needed. If it is possible, a system which had an understanding of where you were in a house could reduce transmition, or produce a targeted signal, both of which could improve performance, security and reduce energy usage.

So there are simple ways energy reduction is achievable now using existing technology, and I'm sure there are many others that we don't have to wait for 2015 to implement. That's not what the Green Touch consortium are promising us however, they are promising a revolutionary new network infrastructure, backwards compatible and with an energy efficiency of 1000 times more than anything we've seen before. We'll just have to wait and see what the geniuses at Bell Labs come up with.

Summary

I'm not sure what motivated this sudden consortium Alcatel-Lucent have put together, maybe an executive watched "The 11th Hour" and got inspired or his kids asked uncomfortable questions about a warming world. Whatever the motivation (and I don't think it's any coincidence it comes hot on the heels of Copenhagen) I'm glad this is on the agenda. IT needs to play it's part in the sustainable, low carbon world, and networks are an integral part of that.

I look forward to seeing what the Green Touch initiative comes up with, I hope it is a genuinely industry wide sharing of energy efficiency knowledge, as we will all benefit from this, particularly the residents of low lying island nations.

IT, Copenhagen and Climate Change

2009-12-09T18:33:00.001+00:00

The International Telecommunication Union has successfully lobbied for IT to be included in the drafts of the Copenhagen protocols being discussed by the worlds nations over the next two weeks.

This will mean IT can be included in projects under the Clean Development Mechanism, allowing investments in IT in the developing world to offset carbon emissions in the developed world. Understandably most of the players in the field are supporting this in hope of a fresh injection of capital into IT, and hopefully some genuine aspirations for combatting dangerous climate change.

That IT can address global warming is a powerful idea and feeds into the developed worlds hopes that technological solutions will provide a fix to the problems our behavioural and consumptive practises have gotten us into. Many people are aware of the Gartner statistics that IT contributes as significantly as aviation to global warming, and I thought a run down of some of the excellent reports showing how we reduce the carbon footprint of the rest of society would be useful, which is the basis of the ITU's declaration at Copenhagen.

Saving the climate @ the speed of light Website
The Worldwide Fund for Nature in the US has completed a number of reports looking at ICT and it's ability to reduce anthropogenic climate change. Once you get past the standard "Green IT" photos of laptops in grass, or someone using a laptop with a plant next to them, there is plenty of good information here about how technology can be the saviour rather than the villian.

Smart 2020 Website
A collaboration between the Climate Group and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, quotes the statistic that 15% of business as usual Greenhouse Gas Emissions can be reduced by ICT. Has sections on dematerialisation, smart grids, transport and more. Perhaps the most influential of all reports.

European Union Website
With catchy titles and case like "COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE AND THE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS on mobilising Information and Communication Technologies to facilitate the transition to an energy-efficient, low-carbon economy" it's strange that this report hasn't been more widely circulated. In fairness though there is a lot of good European centric info in the reports the EU has produced, well worth a look at what people closer to policy makers are thinking.

Carbon Connections Website
A Vodfone initiative on how mobile could be used to tackle emissions in the European Union. Outlines 13 opportunities for mobile technology to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of Europe by 2.4% of expected output in 2020. Of course they see mobile as the solution in all cases, but still a thought provoking report.

Connected Urban Development Website
A programme by Cisco after they promised to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Clinton Global Initiative. I find this website fascinating, whilst not as large in scope as some of the reports above, a whole host of solutions like better public transport information, remote working, energy management and smart buildings. Some great futuristic thinking, and they are implementing these solutions in pilot cities which is even better.

I'll be looking at summarising what each of these reports says in future blogs, especially as our world leaders meet to discuss climate change we need the sort of innovative solutions to our problems that these reports detail. There will be many facets of our move to a low carbon society, and ICT will inevitably be one of the pillars.

Power Management and your PCs

2009-11-25T12:00:00.036+00:00

Turning off a pc out of hours saves energy, therefore money and green house gas emissions. It therefore seems simple enough that we should all turn our pc's off when we leave the office or home. Many office users and home pc users don't do this however for a variety of reasons. The statistics about how many are hard to quantify, figures of between 30% and 70% leaving their pc's powered on have been found in various industries, whilst in the recent survey by tickbox.net only 13% of respondents owned up to it. Whichever figure is true this is still a massive number of users, wasted energy, and unneccessary contributions to pollution and climate change. Of course one of the major drivers is cost, estimates say the UK wastes £300 Million per year (PC Energy Report 2009).

There are some who still cling on to outdated information about power cycling being bad for the hard drives. Not true anymore, hasn't been for many years. Our modern hard drives are rated at 40,000 power ons, something your unlikely to achieve turning your pc off at night a couple of hundred times a year. As hard drives spin constantly when on, as well as being prone to heat stress, there's even some belief that it will prolong their lives to turn them off. Check any hard drive manufacturers website on whether powering up damages their drives if you still aren't convinced.

For others it's the boot up time, pc's take time to initialise the operating system and programmes, and then these days you have a number of network based services that need to be synchronised, and on an overloaded network or server that can all take some time. For these users, hibernating the machine is a good option. Hibernation writes the current state of your desktop and applications to disk and then powers down the computer. When you turn it back on, it should be back to the state you had it at previously in less than a minute, with thirty seconds being a more usual time, shorter than the time it takes to say good morning to your colleagues.

Of course there is still a minority of office computer users who won't power down their machines. Rather than continue an intellectual debate that was decisively settled by the drive manufacturers in the last century, you should probably turn to a power management solution.

The most difficult thing about choosing a power management solution is the vast array of products out there. From large commercial products with plenty of features such as centralised reporting, to some free community supported offerings, to programmes for individual pcs, the choice is not an easy one. Which you choose is largely a matter of budget, and what features you need.

As an environmental charity we don't have the infrastructure to test all of these programmes, but this post will get you up to speed on what is currently out there and what we know about their feature set. We'll be very interested in hearing about your individual experiences with these products.

Centralised Commercial Applications

Generally these applications only make sense for larger organisations. Depending on the product you should start seeing return on investment at about 50-100 employees. All of these offer centralised reporting of power savings and costs, usually via a web interface with graphs, downloadable statistics etc.

1e - Nightwatchman

1e is headquartered in the UK and the US. Nightwatchman is similar to Surveyor, but also has other functionality on top so may be something for people looking for other central management features. They have won the contract to provide energy management solutions to the UK government and claim to scale to up to 200,000 pcs. They offer a free 30 day trial.

They also offer some interesting products like “Wake on Web”, which allows your users who need to access their pc’s out of hours to wake them up from a website.

http://www.1e.com/SoftwareProducts/NightWatchman/

Verdiem - Surveyor

Headquartered in Seattle, Verdiem have offices in the

. They offer a free 30 day trial of the software. Their UK reseller IT Energy, will first do an audit of current computer energy usage and then use this to make an ROI case.

http://www.it-energy.co.uk

Data Synergy – Powerman

based company, They provide a free IT energy savings report for companies with more than 5,000 computers, and will refund the cost of an audit from the purchase price for smaller companies. Appears less expensive than Surveyor or Nightwatchman.

http://www.datasynergy.co.uk/products/powerman/

Faronics – Powersave

Faronics is a US based company which is making headway into the UK Market. Their Powersave offering supports both Macs and Pcs so should be good for the educational market where they also offer a discount.

http://www.faronics.com/html/PowerSave.asp

Other Centralised Applications

EPA – EZ GPO

For the brave and technically minded, the EPA offers a free tool downloadable from their site. It enables centralised configuration of power management settings via Active Directory profiles not native to Windows 2000 and XP. Free is the right price of course but it doesn’t provide centralised reporting.

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_mgt_ez_gpo

Single User Applications

These all help an individual user activate power settings. Some then report those savings to the user, or centrally. Most of them are windows only, though at least one works on the Mac.

EPA - EZ-Wizard

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_mgt_ez_wiz

Surveyor - Edison

Free tool from the makers of Surveyor.

http://www.verdiem.com/edison.aspx

HP – Power to Change

Slick website, which is almost worth the visit, reports the savings to a centralised database.

http://www.hp.com/go/powertochange

Northern Softworks – Lights Out (Mac)

http://www.northernsoftworks.com/lightsout.html

Summary

We are keeping an eye on the field and are hoping to do some testing on the savings claims of individual products. The current situation seems to be that there are a vast swathe of products out there, which all claim to do similar things, and you'll have to take advantage of the free trials and free downloads to find which one is right for you.

IT and the Environment

2009-11-06T11:35:00.001+00:00

Information Technology touches our lives in so many ways, underpinning much of the infrastructure of our modern societies.

If IT in some ways defines our information rich, fast paced culture, it also holds a mirror up to our cultures environmental and social problems.

From the extraction of the resources in computer components, the "sweatshops" often used in their manufacture, the wasteful usage practises, to the toxic waste generated when they are discarded, the IT industry behaves in many ways rooted in the past.

Contrast this with how much the intelligent use of IT can do to address the worlds problems, leading us to an efficient and sustainable future. The industry can reach out into society and make our transport, energy systems, workplaces, markets and production of goods cleaner and more efficient.

This blog is dedicated to both these aspects of Information Technology, reducing its own environmental footprint and advocating for its application to the same goal beyond the industry.

We hope you enjoy reading it, and we look forward to your comments, opinions, and participation in what we think is an important debate, bringing together as it does, two of the great themes of our modern culture, our environment and technology.