Expanding green IT

IDG News Service — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:59:59 -0400

Squeezed between a woodworking unit and a grimy garage is a tiny billboard workshop in Bangalore that says: 'We Use Eco-Freindly [sic] Plastics'. Set in its surroundings, it's a somewhat incongruous place to find a green advertisement -- given that until recently 'eco-friendly' was a concept aimed at a more elitist market. If green has found a home in a hole-in-the-wall, it's a testament to the way it's being marketed.

The obvious irony hides another sign of our times: that passersby are so jaded with promises of green products that they ignore the contradiction in 'eco-friendly plastic'. In the hype around being green, people have learnt, almost anything, will fly.

But a little hyperbole isn't slowing down the green movement -- if anything it's whipping it on. When vendors started tom-tomming green IT about 18 months ago, Indian CIOs just nodded along. But, today, green conferences are standing room only. Enterprises --and not necessarily just those in the green vanguard -- are fast realizing that it makes business sense to endorse green IT solutions.

Still, precious few Indian enterprises have actually gotten their feet wet. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a CIO magazine survey on green IT, for example, say they don't monitor IT-related energy spending. Only 16 percent say they plan -- at some time -- to measure their carbon footprints.

In this sea of talk, Bangalore-based Wipro Technologies has adopted an approach to green like few others. It is making the environment a priority by positioning it as an enterprise-wide issue -- same tack that Wipro used some years ago to make quality its USP.

As one of the few successful examples of green IT in India, Wipro has important lessons to share. There are two prominent aspects to Wipro's green deployment. The first is that it is driven from the top. And second, IT is among the most important drivers of the enterprise-wide push -- a fact that could herald a shift in the way CIOs look at themselves.

The Green Brigade

If there's one thing that characterizes the Wipro approach to green, it's that Azim Premji, chairman and CEO, is making it his personal mission to drive the change. He's making the time and the effort to create the energy and structure needed to propel a green philosophy to every corner of the Rs 18,900-crore company. In his bid to create a greener Wipro, one of the richest Indians in the world has involved himself deeply in the mission. He was, for example, personally involved in forming a formal charter for ecological sustainability called Ecoeye, which was created eight months ago. Premji has been closely involved with Ecoeye from its inception and still scrutinizes its progress on a regular basis. He's also ensured that three of the six-member governance council report to him directly.

"Wipro's governance council comprises the senior-most echelons of the organization's leadership," says Jethin Chandran, GM-IT Planning at Wipro. "This is a concerted, corporationwide initiative to transform the way we do business and engage all our stakeholders. It aims at making Wipro ecologically sustainable in every dimension, responsible, and go beyond compliance."

Leading Ecoeye is Anurag Behar, chief executive, Wipro Infrastructure Engineering & corporate VP, community initiatives. Laxman Badiga, CIO for Wipro, is an active member of the governing council, which consists of the CFO, CTO, head of HR, chief strategy officer and Behar. (Badiga is responsible for IT, facilities, and civil infrastructure). Lower down the pyramid, business units are responsible for driving green initiatives to the 95,000-plus Wipro staffers. A central program office acts as a catalyst and orchestrates the entire program. Each business unit has a champion who represents its interests and is responsible for set goals. All projects, says Chandran, are looked at from an ecological as well as financial perspective and are signed off by the governing council. Though, he adds, funding for some projects are done separate from the standard operating budget.

Until being green is a 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 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 our building power costs," says Chandran.

"The initial cost of deploying the initiative was high. But, it resulted in a significant reduction in the operating expenses," he adds. "By rolling out power management tools, for instance, we have reduced power consumption by 26 percent."

And there's more. He says that virtual collaboration technologies like Live Meeting and Live Communication Server integrated with desktop video phones have helped reduce travel and communication costs and increase productivity. He estimates that these technologies have saved Wipro travel costs worth $250,000 (about Rs 1 crore).

At Wipro, says Chandran, energy efficiency has been identified as a key parameter for any technology rollout. With every location, the company saves approximately Rs 40 lakh a year in electricity costs alone. With virtualization and consolidation, the company is targeting a reduction in its server footprint by 3 percent, Chandran adds.

Buoyed by these results, Wipro has gone all out to endorse green IT, extending the initiative to its building infrastructure as well. "When we build new buildings, we focus on making them green buildings. In fact, we have received a US Green Building Council Certification for a building at Gurgaon and one at Kochi. All new buildings will meet US Green Building Council Certification norms," says Chandran.

This momentum is beginning to create new energies that are spawning their own initiatives. "We've reduced our energy consumption per capita by 13 percent over a six-year period starting from 2002. In the current year, while we already have targets for energy efficiency, we are recalibrating our plans in the light of our recently completed carbon base-lining exercise and our defined goals for carbon neutrality," says Badiga.

"We are continually seeking new areas to drive green IT. We look at innovating technologies that are coming up and see how we can use it in terms of having more integrated applications," says Giridhar.

Wipro believes that they have just commenced the journey towards ecological sustainability. "The scope and ambition of our charter is truly big. The Ecoeye charter goes beyond Wipro. It is a collaborative effort between our customers, suppliers and employees. We are also working on establishing a supply chain social environmental responsibility guidelines and work with suppliers to identify materials that will reduce the environmental impact of their products," says Chandran.

If green is to be truly sustainable, it's going to need that kind of environment-changing commitment. Fortunately, that's also the same kind of long-haul determination that cuts through hype.