meeting technologies to reduce travel and our carbon footprint. These are some of the ways in which IT can play a significant role," says Badiga.
"A CIO can look at IT and communication in terms of wireless and Wimax to increase energy conservation further. He should look at how he can apply technology to his business environment. Basically it is a CIO's role to see how technology can be leveraged to drive green IT," says M. Bala Giridhar, VP-IT, Wipro.
The move to breathe green into their datacenters, however, was easier said than done. The transition, for one, was a daunting prospect. "There were a lot of financial implications involved with the green push. The initial investment to virtualize infrastructure, for example, was Rs 60 lakh," says Chandran. But as Wipro adds more virtualization infrastructure to meet business needs, the IT team will need to augment that spending by 5 to 10 percent, says Chandran. The good news? They have downsized their capital expenditure by 50 to 60 percent annually.
That said, it is a challenge to convert an existing, non-green datacenter into a green one, cautions Chandran. "Retrofitting can create a lot of impact. Then there are challenges in downtime," he says.
Wipro adopted two approaches to confront these challenges. One was IT-focused and the other energy-focused. "From an IT perspective, we started migrating servers to a virtualized environment with every new procurement and deployment. Then, we slowly took them into production. In parallel, we started re-looking at the power from the rack servers. When you add blade servers, changing power servers has to be done in a planned way and notification is needed because the move requires some downtime," Chandran says.
Like many large projects, support for the upfront costs of introducing greener technology to the enterprise had to come from the business -- even within Wipro. This is because organizations view sustainability from various angles, including hard cost savings, which can come from more energy efficiency and increased brand value. The common constant tends to be the business case rather than altruism.
But they had other problems that would take a lot more sweat to solve. Wipro held store by its datacenter blueprint, which maintained data like how the organization laid out its racks, how much cooling and power was needed per rack, etcetera. But when they decided to make their datacenters green, the whole blueprint needed to undergo a review.
"We decided that apart from one exception, all our servers would be based on blades to cater to the density within a rack. This meant that we had to re-architect the power within the racks," says Chandran. But to address those high-density power structures within the racks, they had to re-architect the power and cooling in their upcoming datacenter. "We have also tightened our process of datacenter hosting. Earlier, anybody could come and host anything they wanted. Now, we have ensured that a proper datacenter inventory is kept," Chandran says.
But if there is one piece of advice that Chandran wants to give other CIOs it's this: "IT must be an enabler of the organization's larger sustainability strategies and goals. Therefore, a CIO must work closely with the 'sustainability office' and other key stakeholders like the CFO, the facilities and infrastructure group, etcetera. IT should look beyond hardware-centric green initiatives like datacenter efficiency and see how apps can accelerate sustainability goals with software solutions to help carbon accounting and abide by GRI guidelines," he states.
Despite the learning curve, Chandran says that they emerged richer from the experience. The lessons they have learnt have equipped them with the expertise to build other green datacenters.
Green Gets Wings
By exploiting these untapped opportunities, Wipro is now reaping rich financial dividends. "So far, we have achieved savings of around 2.8 million kWh. We've started registering a reduction in areas like desktop power where there has been 20 to 30 percent reduction and a 15 percent reduction in
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