Retail and Hospitality

Commentary:

Green IT in the retail sector

29 April 2008

Adopting green policies and practices is essential for a retailer’s credibility says Dr Bernd Kosch, vice president of alliances at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. Happily, a sustainable IT strategy has interesting links with cost efficiency.

Consumer power is going to be influential on all aspects of the green agenda and so it is becoming important for business, perhaps especially for retail business. Retailers are in direct contact with consumer trends and know that they need to react quickly to them. For example, retailers have rapidly responded to their customers’ wishes for organic foods and fair trade products.

Retailers will source energy-efficient IT products for their customers for exactly the same reasons they source fair trade coffee. So IT departments will have to keep pace, both by saving energy and by specifying environmentally friendly materials in equipment.

The issues are different for in-store and for the data centre. The big change perhaps is that a server now costs more to run, in energy alone, over its lifetime than the original capital cost of the equipment.

There are some immediate measures that can be taken to reduce energy use. Most of the power management settings in client PCs, such as those found in store back office and POS, are not adjusted to the optimum energy saving settings. IT departments should adjust existing equipment so that PCs ‘hibernate’ when not in use. To help, Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) now ships with optimised energy settings in Windows.

A strategic review may involve replacing client computers with models that have more efficient power supplies. A good route to take is to join an organisation such as climate savers, a worldwide initiative to recruit companies and individuals to the cause of energy saving. Climate savers requires you to commit to the strategy of using energy-efficient PCs. The goals are very specific, for example ‘during 2008 to only purchase PCs that are Energy Star 4 compliant’ and to have at least 20 per cent of all new PCs equipped with power supply units with 85 per cent efficiency. In 2010 85 per cent will be the minimum requirement for all new PCs and 20 per cent should reach the 90 per cent efficiency level. Energy Star is a standard developed by the environmental protection agency (EPA) in the US, is recognised by the European Commission and is a good benchmark to work with.

The dispersed nature of the retailer’s IT system comes into focus at this point, and the appropriate overall IT architecture to achieve the best energy-saving results. It may be time to look at consolidating some functions carried out by client PCs in the store back office into a data centre where utilisation will be much higher. The difference in utilisation between a client PC (seven per cent) and a server (80 to 90 per cent) is huge. Also, a server uses nearly the same amount of energy whatever level of utilisation it’s working at.

Because servers use power continuously, the first area to look at is consolidation, through the replacement of the oldest servers by new technology. Modern quad core processors are the equivalent of four processors but they don’t use four times the energy. IT departments can quantify the performance they are getting per energy unit and in the near future it will become very natural to test servers in this way. The standard performance evaluation corporation (SPEC) has been laying down benchmarks for servers for 20 years and all the leading IT vendors are members. In December 2007 SPEC published a benchmark for server performance, relating Java transactions to electrical power consumed.

In the same way that a car driver wants to know how many kilometres he gets from a litre of fuel, the IT manager wants to know how much work he gets from one watt of energy. Just as the fuel efficiency of a car changes depending on its speed, so too can server efficiency at different load levels. So the SPEC benchmark tests at load levels from 10 to 90 per cent. FSC is part of the team involved in this benchmark and was one of the first manufacturers to submit test results. It’s important to read the results carefully and to distinguish between overall low power consumption and comparable levels of power consumption for specified performance.

IT managers should review the lifecycle of current servers to see if buying modern servers with higher quality power supplies and machine components save resources in the long run. FSC’s Primergy TX120 server uses one third less energy.

Energy-efficient components cost more but we have reached a point when it is important to look at the lifecycle cost and to include energy costs. A significant part of these costs is cooling the data centre. Sometimes large data centres have a technical issue with getting enough power to one location and data centre planning can involve developing schemes to use heat from the servers to warm office space or water.

In smaller data centres the cost ratios are the same and it still makes sense to assess new servers by combining the hardware budget and the energy budget. This will result in the true cost of the equipment over the lifecycle and reveal the best course of action. SPEC benchmarks can help devise optimal usage patterns.

FSC’s vision of the modern data centre includes our work on virtualisation, the dynamic data centre. Upgrading server software is also an option and Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 has built-in virtualisation technology, which is significant progress. It’s the most comprehensive control ever on a Windows platform.

The green grid is an industry consortium with similar goals to climate savers. It has given itself the charter to define criteria for judging how environmentally friendly data centre operations are. It’s early days for green grid as it begins to establish energy efficient standards in a strategic manner. The EPA is also working on Energy Star-type standards for servers – with advice from FSC – and publication is likely to come midway through 2008.

Another important aspect of green computing is the use of components that can be recycled. Recycling of old equipment is a job for specialists and in Europe the WEEE directive (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) makes the manufacturer responsible.

It is 20 years since FSC opened its first recycling centre in Paderborn to deal with electronic waste in an appropriate way, before customers were fully aware of such environmental issues. FSC built its first green PC in 1993, winning a German eco-label Blue Angel award in the following year. FSC always likes to be ahead of the government. For example we implemented the WEEE directive many months before the legally required date in 2006.

As members of the green grid and climate savers, and advisors to EPA, FSC commits to meeting prescribed targets in energy efficiency and to developing new standards. The seeds have been sown for energy-efficient and environmentally friendly IT that can preserve resources and match corporate goals.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 edition of Retailspeak.