matter of hygiene, it looks like the green agenda has to be driven from the top to ensure widespread success, especially because green's upfront costs can be a big bite for an organization.
The movement's drivers at Wipro, for example, have never had to slug it out with business to get financial backing because going green is a part of the organization's corporatewide initiative. But this does not mean that they can hand out blank checks.
Organizations should "not just focus on the investment under question but the total cost of ownership considering direct and indirect costs. The savings in operating costs will pay for the investments,' says Laxman Badiga, CIO for Wipro.
The ROI justification is necessary because while the impact of green technologies and projects is immediate, the financial rewards may accrue over a longer period -- one of the challenges hindering the early adoption of green initiatives.
"We've started applying these technologies -- in IT or other areas in the new infrastructure -- while we work, in parallel, on existing infrastructure. It's better to have measurable benefits quickly to sustain the focus," says Chandran.
And just because green works successfully when it's driven from the top, it doesn't mean that CIOs don't have a critical role to play.
IT for Green
Like many other IT departments at Indian enterprises, the IT team at Wipro started their green journey with the low-hanging fruit. It used consolidation and virtualization to scale down their energy consumption in the datacenter.
"This initiative will save space and also optimize power and cooling requirements in datacenters," says M. Bala Giridhar, VP-IT, Wipro.
Virtualization enhances a datacenter by saving space and cooling. "Space was never an issue, but cooling was a big challenge for us," says Chandran. The exponential growth of Wipro's server use was becoming a major issue and the IT team decided to tackle the problem with virtualization. "Our business is growing at 30 to 40 percent every year and our servers are growing at the same rate. This created an impact on energy and cooling. We wanted to reduce energy costs and management costs. We found that the best solution was to use blade servers and virtualized capacity. With these, you can host more servers, add to your capacity and reduce your cooling and power requirements," says Chandran.
Both Wipro's datacenters run on a lean-and-green principle, says Chandran. This, he says, can help enhance the efficiency of data storage and overcome the challenges created by unrestrained datacenter growth. By combining technologies such as automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and storage virtualization, Wipro can better utilize capacity and decrease storage costs -- and consequently minimize the costs of powering, cooling and housing IT equipment. This, he says, can drastically reduce the total cost of their datacenters while slashing their environmental impact. "Reducing the ecological footprint of the company's IT assets was our prime concern," says Chandran.
The strategy to green their datacenters covers a number of aspects including space, power, cooling and how they used their computing and storage infrastructure. "In the last quarter of 2007, a decision was taken to look at blade servers and virtualization as a first step. The amount of space we used in the datacenter was optimized by consolidating our servers for different applications. This helped open up space and optimize our cooling needs," Badiga explains.
Already these efforts have begun to bloom. Green IT has transformed Wipro's power-guzzling IT function into an ecologically-responsible enterprise unit. "We've drastically reduced our servers from 400 to 100. Every year, Wipro saves close to 1 million kWh (kilo watt hour) of power," says Chandran. Enough to run over 34,000 households for a day.
And that was just the start. The IT team is simultaneously driving green along four lines of attack. "Wipro is targeting quantum improvements in energy efficiency by server consolidation, improving datacenter energy use, managing desktop power, better printer utilization and the use conference and
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