How green is my computer?

• Brad Howarth
• 4 August 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Amongst the verdant fields of the Italian province of Umbria, a small winery and olive grower is pointing the way for environmentally conscious small business owners around the world.

According to Lorenzo Fasola-Bologna, the chief executive of the Monte Vibiano winery, the last decade has presented a definite change in the climate of his idyllic region, with the summers growing hotter.

"As a wine producer and olive grower, I could notice that the climate is changing," he says. "2003 was a dry vintage for olive oil - if it is going to continue to be this hot then we are not going to have a production of olive oil."

So Fasola-Bologna set out on what he described as a 360-degree environmental revolution, using technology to reduce the environmental impact of his own production, and hopefully inspiring others to do likewise.

"We wanted to show that... millions of us together can make a lot of change," he says.

Monte Vibiano adopted solar power to charge the electric cars used by staff to move around the winery, and switched to biodiesel for other vehicles.

There has also been a significant change in how the winery organises its IT. Using virtualisation technology from Microsoft, and with the help of his 24-year-old IT manager, Alessandro Giannoni, Fasola-Bologna has halved the number of servers his winery runs on from four to two, cutting the amount of power used by 38%.

Virtualisation is one of a growing cadre of technologies available to businesses that want to reduce their power consumption and carbon emissions. Rather than running software applications on their own physical servers, virtualisation divides up hardware servers into multiple ‘virtual' servers, each capable of running applications as though they were sitting on their own real-world box. This means that each box is utilised more effectively.

Fasola-Bologna has also been using Microsoft's Communications Suite, including collaboration tools and audio and videoconferencing, to keep in closer contact with his many customers. By doing so he has cut his air travel significantly.

"I was taking 220 flights a year," says Fasola-Bologna. "This year, it's not more than 80."

Altogether, his efforts have meant that Monte Vibiano has gone from producing 890 tonnes of carbon in 2003 to well beyond carbon-neutral.

Power hungry

The research group Gartner estimates that IT currently contributes around 2% of the world's greenhouse emissions, primarily through the electricity that is used to power and cool computers and servers. For white-collar businesses, IT can be one of the biggest consumers of power and one of the easiest places to look for energy efficiencies.

Technology makers have taken great strides to reduce the power appetites of their technology. Intel for instance has introduced multiple new technologies to improve the performance of its processor chips without an equivalent increase in power consumption.

In June, Hewlett-Packard announced a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to promote energy-efficient computing, donating US$10 from the sale of every energy-efficient HP dx2810 Special Edition PC to the WWF.

Even its printers are going green. The HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 Wireless All-in-One allows users to print professional-quality business documents with 50% lower cost-per-page and energy use than laser printers.

Part of the solution for businesses is as simple as making sure machines are switched off at night.

A computer in screensaver mode does little to reduce the amount of power it consumes, but most PCs can be set up to automatically power off after a given period of time.

HP estimates that if 100,000 people did this every day, energy savings could total more than 2680 kilowatt-hours and carbon emission reductions could total more than 1.5 metric tons each day. This is the equivalent of taking more than 105 cars off the road. A single computer, left on 24 hours a day, dumps approximately 680kg of carbon dioxide into the world's atmosphere in a year, and costs the user more than $180 in electricity bills.

Environmentally sound alternatives

The founding director of green consulting business Climate Friendly, Joel Fleming, says his business uses notebooks rather than PCs, as these are designed from the outset to consume the least power.

"That creates about an 80% energy usage saving," says Fleming. "And our whole company runs on green power. The simplest principle with technology is, if you can marry the choice of energy-efficient technology with the renewable energy to power that equipment, then you have a zero-carbon solution."

It is possible to go one step further and do away with PCs and notebooks in favour of ‘thin client' computers. These devices consist of little more than a screen and a keyboard, with the actual computing handled at the server. Sun Microsystems sells its thin clients under the brand Sunray and claims they consume only 5% of the power of a regular PC.

Smart power meters also give companies a better understanding of their power consumption in real time, letting them see their consumption as it happens. Some power companies are deploying these now, but in the meantime devices such as the Power Mate from CCI can also show the true running cost of appliances.

Virtually simple

The virtualisation technology that Monte Vibiano used to reduce its servers can also help to cut emissions. The technology was pioneered by the US software maker VMware and is now also available from rivals including Microsoft, Oracle and Citrix.

According to Larry Orecklin, general manager for virtualisation at Microsoft, the immediate value that virtualisation delivers makes it a simple decision for smaller business.

"People such as Monte Vibiano can take advantage of it quite easily, and so we are seeing a broad-based adoption happening," he says.

Orecklin is aware, however, of the wariness that many such small businesses feel relating to new technologies, and that they would rather get on with running their business than learning about virtualisation.

"So we've been spending a lot of time trying to create best practices and to make it very simple for people to adopt... easy to download, install and test, with free tools," he says. "We get all this because we work across thousands of customers and we aggregate all that data together."