Government Technology - November 2007 - (Page 38)

green technology Green IT emerges as a solution to rising energy prices. j j Synopsis: Green IT is slowly catching interest in state and local government as a path to cheaper electricity bills. Agency: California Environmental Protection Agency. Technologies: Green data centers, energy-efficient computers, Windows Vista. Contact: Gary Arstein-Kerslake, IT officer, California Environmental Protection Agency, 916/341-6147. state local federal Talking NOV_07 Money owering and cooling data centers will match the capital costs of the data centers by 2012, according to International Data Corp. Privatesector IT leaders have shown that reconfigured data centers and better heat tracking mechanisms reduce the electricity required to power and cool servers, and state and local governments are beginning to follow suit. Green IT currently may not be top priority for most government CIOs, but surging electricity bills may soon force government to get hip with surprising rapidity. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) featured green IT on a conference agenda for the first time at its annual meeting in September 2007. Each year, NASCIO bases its conference agenda on what state CIOs identify as their top priorities. Though CIOs listed green IT as an important issue, it still failed to make the top 20, said Doug Robinson, executive director of NASCIO. “When you’re competing with front-page issues like IT security, consolidation, disaster recovery, ERP [enterprise resource planning] P BY ANDY OPSAHL | GREEN TECHNOLOGY EDITOR implementation, ERP strategies, health information technology — that’s the challenge. It’s not as strategic as some of those,” Robinson said. “It’s much more tactical.” Large technology vendors — such as IBM, HP, Dell and AMD — are encouraging green IT in both the public and private sectors by joining industry initiatives, like the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which started last June. Participating companies promise to build machines that are at least 90 percent efficient in their power use by 2010. “A few years ago, nobody cared much about how much energy they were using,” said Brad Westpfahl, director of government industry programs at IBM. “They were trying to optimize other things. Now the cost of energy has gone up, and political awareness of the impact on the environment has gone up.” Green Data Centers A number of solutions have emerged to help reduce energy consumption in data centers. One of the lowest levels of technology, the computer chip, can make servers greener. Servers can use multicore chips, which enable the machines to perform more computational tasks with less electricity. Many government data centers waste energy by spreading work across many servers, leaving most of them with unused capacity. This leaves agencies paying to power and cool extra servers that don’t need to be in the data center. Server consolidation initiatives reduce this problem. These plans may include deployment of virtualization software that can compress a data center’s work down to just a few servers, further reducing power and cooling needs. IT departments can also deploy software that more efficiently juggles computing tasks. For instance, IBM released a product called IBM Director, which lets IT departments maintain a power consumption level prescribed by the department. IT staff specify the priorities of the different tasks. Director helps them schedule all IT jobs to stay within the constraints of that power consumption level. For example, Director could tell the data center to execute a job immediately or wait to perform the task during nonpeak electricity times. 38 http://www.govtech.com

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Government Technology - November 2007 Contents Point of View Way Back Machine The Last Mile GT Spectrum Big Picture Building Better Government Up Close Inspector Gadget By the Numbers Money Talking No Greenwashing Pinching Pennies Bay Bridge Bustle Two Cents Products Signal: Noise

Government Technology - November 2007

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