Green IT

Sustainability is sweeping the sector and the focus is moving from buildings and residences to IT systems.

With such widespread talk of carbon footprints, renewables and sustainability, the green debate is raging. Just as effective waste management and efficient energy use make their way into the UK's campus kitchens and accommodation, the IT suite is their newest target. In the UK alone, we generate 1.8 million tonnes of electronic waste every year.

Even if functionality and usability are givens, the sustainability of IT systems is ripe for improvement.
In a recent poll of its members, UCISA (University and Colleges Information Systems Association) cited the funding of sustainable IT systems as its top concern. The Joint Information System Committee last year put out a tender for a report into sustainable IT in the HE sector, whose primary focus was to outline where sustainability in the sector is heading and to identify best practice.

The report, which is almost halfway through its 10-month lifespan, has been taken on by HEEPI (Higher Education Environment Performance Improvement) and SustainIT, an NGO examining the environmental implication of IT systems.

"The report has three main elements," says its author, Peter James, "We want to review sustainable IT in the sector, make people aware of examples of sustainable IT practice, and give them the tools for best practice in the future."

On one hand, the environmental impact of IT can be positively affected with measures such as minimising printing, simply turning computers off when out of use, or recycling printer cartridges - almost 90 per cent of all printing and copier cartridges in the UK can be recycled and reused. On the other, energy efficiency, or inefficiency, is at the heart of the hardware that provides colleges and universities with their networks.
Peter distinguishes a three-fold impact of IT hardware. There is the equipment impact, i.e. what happened to it in energy and labour terms prior to its arrival on campus. He then identifies its energy implications and waste regulations once its on campus, installed and running. Finally, and most importantly, the way in which it is used. "A desktop computer running at full speed" James remarks, "is only using 10 - 20 per cent of its capacity."

Networking is key. What is known in the business as grid computing enables the use, through efficient networks and connectivity, of that spare 80-90 per cent of computing capacity.
"It's an underutilised aspect of client server architecture," says James,enabling big jobs to be broken into small chunks."

Using grid computing, when a university or college IT suite is out of use by staff and students, it is possible to capitalise upon the underused capacity of its hardware. Not only can the computer's use be optimised, there is the added energy saving.

One aspect of grid computing that is coming on apace is what's known as virtualisation, which makes more efficient use of the large-scale servers that characterise IT systems of the size and complexity necessitated by the HE sector. The major advantage of virtualisation is that all-important energy saving. So how does it work?

"Typically, an institution might have twenty physical servers running separate applications," James explains, "but with virtualisation it is possible to run many different applications on a single server. Physical servers become virtual servers."

"We now run 190-200 applications on just nine real servers," says Mark Lee, Head of IT at Sheffield Hallam University, which recently scooped a first class honours in People & Planet's Green League Table.
"We have rigorously pursued server virtualisation," he continues, "because previously, the capacity of our hardware far outstripped our ability to load it." Lee claims that the servers set up to run single applications were just 5-10 per cent efficient. As server capacity increases, and prices come down, virtualisation is a key area for advancement, technologically and environmentally.

At Sheffield Hallam, it has paid dividends. "We're saving £40,000 a year in electricity," Lee says proudly, "and have reduced our carbon footprint by about 100 tonnes a year." With 30,000 students, 6,000 of whom use the university's IT resources from overseas, theirs is a salient example of sustainable IT practice.
"Currently, the netwworks aren't that well developed," James identifies, "so we want to create networks to educate people. Universities would do well to appoint a green IT champion as a central point of contact and link to the people."

With a series of IT open days run by HEEPI and Sustain IT coming up, IT departments will have the opportunity to learn about how to maximise the sustainability of their existing hardware through systems such as virtualisation, as well as how to rethink their IT strategy in the medium and long-term. In the meantime, as Peter James says, "A good start is getting people to switch things off."