Corporate Culture Can Lead to IT Waste
by Mark Ontkush, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 
on 05. 4.07
Ted Samson at Infoworld raises an interesting question - why do organizations continue to purchase more computers whenever there's a perceived need for more processing power? Furthermore, according to a report from Gartner (a well respected IT research and advisory company), why are these machines only used at 10% of their capability? Samson argues that this is because computers are inexpensive, and organizations, much like people, seem to be creatures of habits. And habits can be bad.
It's easy to relate this to the environmental movement as a whole; besides the obvious implication for IT shops, it's almost a given that it's easier to do the environmentally wrong thing out of habit (e.g. the oil habit, the driving habit), then to do the right thing that might take a little work. Sampson correctly observes that this kind of short-sightedness is now forcing companies into a mad scramble for space in their increasingly cramped data centers, as well as coming up with more dough to pay for increasingly growing energy bills.
Unless companies are willing to tolerate this kind of costly wastefulness, the Gartner report is a real wake-up call. Someone at your company needs to take charge - maybe (as Treehugger has suggested) by hiring a chief sustainability officer. Business as usual just isn't an option. :: Infoworld
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Meet Green Business Consultant Tyler Moorehead, of GreenUnlimited
- Your Idle Computer Can Save Lives
- Create a Go Green Plan: Follow Wa$ted!'s Salon Example
- Wa$ted! Episode: A Hairy Problem
- Be a Green Volunteer in Portland
- Why Building Community is the Greenest Thing You Can Do
Corporate culture (and even government or higher education culture) makes it difficult to dispose of items in ways other than recycling or throwing them away. At the University I work for, I work in Instructional Technology, and it is incredibly difficult to even get permission from the administration to take a PC set for recycling and try to hold onto it to use as a Linux box for my office. It is virtually impossible to even give them to another department that is a very low-budget department. They are not willing to have them mass donated to a program that would fix them up and give them to non-profits. Instead, they must be "disposed" of.
It isn't wastefulness for the sake of wastefulness. It's easy to say 'Generally only 10% of this server's resources are in use, the other 90% is a waste,' until you suddenly need that 90% to deal with some flood of activity (like, being slashdotted, or attacked).
Having far fewer machines might seem less wasteful on the surface, but having half a dozen sysadmins scrambling because one of their main servers is badly overloaded and about to go down in flames is far more costly to a business.
You might as well say 'Mirrored disk is a waste, since you have two disks storing all the same information, so you're wasting one of them.' Fact is, that mirrored disk serves a very important purpose (keeping things running even if one of the two disks fails).
Every ten to fifteen years, things in this industry swing from 'Pack it all onto one huge server to cut down on waste' to 'Spread it out from the one server so task X doesn't affect task Y so much.'
Don't take a simplistic view of this. That would be akin to saying "You store 50 gallons of water in that rain barrel -- that's a waste, that 50 gallons should be back in the environment, not horded and idle!"
There's a lot of work going into "server virtualization" now. That is, having multiple "virtual" servers running on one physical machine, each of which thinks it's the only thing running there. A controller manages all the virtual servers, never letting one crush the others. But if you have five virtual servers each typically using 10% of the real server, if "something" happens and one of them gets heavily used, 40% of the server is already in use. If two of them get hit at the same time, the server seems to only have a quarter of its full power. So it has its disadvantages, too.
IT is a tough area to green. :/
Hi Batzel,
Thanks for posting. Like many of my articles, you can only put so such into two or three paragraphs.
It would be an fairly ill-behaved application that had a 10/90 ratio. Compilers maybe, ad-hoc reporting. And who ever looks at it? Maybe it should be. HP did - they cut 95 data centers to 6, and saved a billion dollars annually.
Virtualization is promising, and drawing from the article in the post, probably vital. But all these systems are timesharing systems - one could run multiple applications on a single server. As you said, that hasn't been done for 15 years; maybe it should be.
mark
I think they are talking about normal pc's and not servers. At least I hope. Not many people need the latest and greatest computer to run a spreadsheet. Programmers and digital artists might, but other than that probably not.