The backbone of every single digital service is a vast network of servers and computing resources that deliver performance and availability necessary for business operations—and hopefully continually improve the customer and end-user experience. These resources are responsible for…

• Performing search queries
• Transferring data
• Delivering computing services

…for millions of users at any given moment, all around the world.

Now take all those servers and consider the power and heat they generate. Anyone who plays games on a laptop, desktop, or gaming platform knows how hot the equipment gets. At the height of the business world, with server rooms stacked with aisles and aisles of computing machines, that problem is significant.

Keeping servers cool is important, especially for enterprise-size businesses—but it also has a significant negative impact on Planet Earth. So, in this article, let’s take a look at data center cooling and how companies can harness simple practices and modern technology to make data center cooling a more sustainable practice.

(This article is part of our Sustainable IT Guide. Use the right-hand menu to explore topics related to sustainable technology efforts.)

What is data center cooling?

Data center cooling is exactly what it sounds like: controlling the temperature inside data centers to reduce heat. Failing to manage the heat and airflow within a data center can have disastrous effects on a business. Not only is energy efficiency seriously diminished—with lots of resources spent on keeping the temperature down—but the risk of servers overheating rises rapidly.

The cooling system in a modern data center regulates several parameters in guiding the flow of heat and cooling to achieve maximum efficiency. These parameters include but aren’t limited to:

• Temperatures
• Cooling performance
• Energy consumption
• Cooling fluid flow characteristics

All of the data center cooling systems components are interconnected and impact the overall efficiency of the cooling system. No matter how you set up your data center or server room, cooling is necessary to achieve a data center that works and is available to run your business.

(Explore best practices for data center migrations & infrastructure management.)

Is data center cooling necessary?

Yes—but maybe to a lesser extent than we have long believed. The general rule of thumb has been to ensure an entire room’s ambient temperate stabilizes at 18 degrees Celsius. But this is unnecessarily low, as Sentry Software explains:

It has been proven that computer systems can operate without problems with an ambient temperature significantly higher…This is the fastest and cheapest method to reduce the energy consumed by a datacenter and improve its P.U.E. [Power Utilization Effectiveness]

The oft-cited example is Google, who successfully raised the temperature of their datacenters to 26.7°C (80° Fahrenheit). We’ll talk more about the famous Google case study later on.

Data center managers should understand how failing to implement effective cooling technology in a server room can quickly cause overheating.

Poorly configured cooling could deliver the wrong type of server cooling to your center (for example, bottom-up tile cooling technology being used with back-front configured modern servers). This, again, would lead to serious overheating, a risk that no business should accept willingly.

Benefits of data center cooling

The business benefits of data center cooling are abundantly clear.

Ensured server uptime

Proper data center cooling technologies allow servers to stay online for longer. Overheating can be disastrous in a professional environment that requires over 99.99% uptime, so any failure at the server level will have knock-on effects for your business and your customers.

Greater efficiency in the data center

Data doesn’t travel faster in cooler server rooms, but it travels a lot faster than if it was trying to travel over a crashed server!

Because data centers can quickly develop hot spots (regardless of whether the data center manager has intended a cold aisle set up or a hot aisle on), creating new solutions to cooling needs to be efficient and easily done on the fly.

This means only using liquid cooling technologies that are easily adaptable or air-cooling systems that can easily change the way cold air is used. Overall, this allows for greater efficiency when scaling up a data center.

Longer lifespan of your technology

Computers that constantly overheat at going to fail before they reach their expected end of life (EOL). For that reason, the expense of cooling systems in a data center quickly starts to pay for itself.

Introducing data center cooling technologies allows for a piece of hardware to survive longer and for a business to spend less on replacing infrastructure. Companies should be moving towards greener IT solutions, not actively creating industrial waste.

(Learn about modernizing the mainframe & your software.)

Drawbacks of data center cooling

Though data center cooling is critical for business success, it has a significant impact on the bottom line—and for Planet Earth.

Costs can be prohibitive

Data center cooling is expensive: so much energy is needed simply to run the servers and data centers. You’ll spend additional energy on reducing the heat these systems generate.

For small-sized operations, state-of-the-art cooling systems are simply not possible. Expensive HVAC systems and intricate water-cooling systems that are specifically designed for data center temperature control can cost well over what SMBs can afford.

But this does not mean that SMB data centers must fail. Simple solutions like blanking panels can be used to encourage the easy flow of cold air throughout the server room. Similarly, organized cables (i.e. not a cable nightmare for an IT technician) can allow for better airflow too.

Severe impact on the planet

As much as 50% of all power used in a data center is spent on cooling technologies. Major enterprises are all moving towards reducing their carbon footprint, which means cooling technologies either have to change—or need to go.

According to the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GESI), in their Smarter 2030 report, the digital world today, at this very moment, encompasses:

• 34 billion pieces of equipment
• More than 4 billion users

With the network infrastructures and data centers associated with these billions and billions, our digital world is responsible for 2.3% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Data centers themselves account for 1% of the world’s electricity consumption and 0.5% of CO2 emissions. And science recognizes that significantly reducing GHG emissions is a mandate in order to slow and reverse the effects of climate change.

As a global collective, tech companies must work together to reduce energy consumption. That’s why we’re seeing more and more companies of all ilk announce their plans to cut GHG emissions—and many of them are turning to data center cooling with a fresh approach.

How to cool data centers

Although setting up a full data center cooling system might seem daunting task, it is a necessary step. All server rooms must have the adequate amount of cooling systems that the technology demands.

In the high-performance world we live in, failing to install a necessary water loop can cause serious issues; a lack of constantly cooler air throughout data centers leads to failures—so get everything installed at the start!

Many specialist organizations work with data centers to properly identify the necessary cooling solutions, install the technology, and manage the data center’s equipment from installation to EOL. Finding one in your local area is the best decision for an IT team that does not have experience in configuring cooling systems in data centers.

How cooling works: drawing heat out

In order to maintain optimal performance of the computing infrastructure, the data center must maintain an optimal room and server hardware temperature. The cooling system essentially draws heat from data center equipment and its surrounding environment. Cool air or fluids replace the heat to reduce the temperature of the hardware.

Data center cooling techniques

Data center cooling is a balancing act that requires the IT technicians responsible for it to consider a number of factors. Among many, some of the most common ways of controlling computer room air are:

• Liquid cooling uses using water to cool the servers. Using a Computer Room Air Handler (CRAH) is a popular way to combine liquid cooling and air cooling, but new emerging technologies like Microsoft’s “boiling water cooling” are used for cooling data center servers and driving evaporative cooling technology.
• Air cooling uses a variety of Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) technology to create east paths for hot air to leave the IT space.
• Raised floor platforms create a chilled space below the raised platform where a CRAH or CRAC can send the heat via chilled water coolers and other technologies which create cold aisles underneath the servers.
• Temperature and humidity controls, such as an HVAC which controls the cooling infrastructure, and other technologies provide air conditioning functionality.
• Control through hot and cold aisle containment allows hot aisles to feed onto cold aisles through the server room. Proper airflow, the use of a raised floor, and other cooling technology such as liquid cooling or HVAC cooling solutions are supported by hot and cold aisles within a data center.

Though necessary for business, these techniques require significant energy spend.

Using AI & neural networks

Significant improvements in cooling system technologies in the last decade have allowed organizations to improve efficiency, but the pace of improvements has slowed more recently. Instead of regularly reinvesting in new cooling technologies to pursue diminishing returns, however, you can now implement artificial intelligence (AI) to efficiently manage the cooling operations of its data center infrastructure.

Traditional engineering approaches struggle to keep pace with rapid business needs. What worked for you in terms of temperature control and energy consumption a decade ago is likely not enough today—and AI can help to accurately model these complex interdependencies.

How AI improves cooling

Google’s implementation of AI to address this challenge involves the use of neural networks, a methodology that exhibits cognitive behavior to identify patterns between complex input and output parameters.

For instance, a small change in ambient air temperature may require significant variations of cool airflow between server aisles, but the process may not satisfy safety and efficiency constraints among certain components.

This relationship may be largely unknown, unpredictable, and behave nonlinearly for any manual or human-supervised control system to identify and counteract effectively.

Organizations today can equip data centers data centers with IoT sensors that provide real-time information on various components, server workloads, power consumption, and ambient conditions. The neural network takes the instantaneous, average, total, or meta-variable values from these sensors to process with the neural network.

Google pioneered this approach in the 2010s, and today, more and more organizations are embracing AI to support necessary IT operations.

(Learn more about AIOps.)

Case study: Google data center

Google’s implementation of the neural network reduced the error to 0.004 Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE) or 0.34-0.37 percent of the PUE value. The error percentage is expected to further reduce as the neural network processes new data sets and validates the results against the actual system behavior. These numbers translate into a 40% energy savings for the data center cooling system.

The graph below demonstrates how the neural network implementation delivered PUE improvements over the years. Since these results are aggregated from multiple data centers operating under different environmental and technical constraints, the optimal implementation of the machine learning algorithm promises even better improvements in comparison with traditional control system implementations.

The neural network algorithm is one of many methodologies that Internet companies including Google may have implemented for data center cooling applications.

Related reading

• BMC IT Operations Blog
• BMC AIOps Blog
• Data Center Guide, a multi-part series
• Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Solutions Explained
• How To Secure a Server Room
• IT Salary Trends Today: The Complete Roundup

When a tire on your car bursts, do you buy a new car? No, you buy some new tires.

Having the right to repair the products that you own seems like it should be obviously true. We own the products, so we should be able to do what we want with them—including taking apart and repairing them. But it’s not possible for all devices, including many cell phones and laptops, because companies maintain the right to their own designs and products. This means that, in certain instances, it might actually be illegal for you to fix something you own.

The Right to Repair is a debate that is raging on. Why do consumers not have the right to access parts and guides to the devices that they own?

The Right to Repair can apply to any industry. Much like the 2012 vote in Massachusetts which allowed car owners to access parts and guides, people today want to get the right to fix devices like laptops, cell phones, and other electronics.

The right to repair cell phones

(This article is part of our Sustainable IT Guide. Use the right-hand menu to explore topics related to sustainable technology efforts.)

What is planned obsolescence?

When a company creates a product, they can plan for it to become obsolete after a certain point. Manufacturers and service vendors force updates that cause older models to become slow or unusable or stop producing the associated support. At some point, the products will stop working optimally and customers get waning support for these products (and eventually no support at all).

Common reasons for planned obsolescence include:

• Ending support for legacy systems
• Encouraging consumers to buy replacement products

Planned obsolescence isn’t inherently bad news. In fact, it’s part of a natural process for a company—any asset management practice will account for end-of-lifing a product. There is no point providing continuing support for an outdated operating system that hardly anyone uses. In the case of IT, software would be made obsolete and its users would be eventually move onto a new version.

But sometimes companies plan to force users to move onto new hardware and software without a good reason, at least from consumers’ point of view. Green organizations and watchdogs criticize this move as creating waste without need.

This failure to give consumers the ability to ensure the continued use of their products has led to the Right to Repair debate.

What is the Right to Repair?

Instead of being forced to buy entirely new products, some users want to be able to purchase devices that can be upgraded over their lifespan. This would include being able to upgrade all aspects of the device, including the processing power, memory, and batteries.

This concept is known as the Right to Repair, and it’s something that people in many countries are demanding legislation supporting. Depending on the products you want to repair, you may or may not actually have that right.

Some companies refuse to release the parts necessary to perform repairs and upgrades. (An oft-cited example is Apple.) That means consumers simply can’t fix a product they own. Instead, they need to turn to the company itself or to third-party vendors that can work on devices.

The Right to Repair movement demands that all companies provide:

• Repair information, including manuals or guides which can help
• Products that can be repaired
• Parts that can be used to repair the products

Microsoft showing the reparability of their products

The Right to Repair debate isn’t limited to technology.

John Deere, an American manufacturer of agricultural products, was in the news for facing backlash from farmers. The farmers were technically breaking the law when they attempted to repair their own equipment unless they had official authorization from John Deere. Pushing for the right to fix their machinery and continue to use repaired equipment was the core of their protests.

These protests spread into the technology sector quickly, with The Repair Association (TRA), a coalition of repair professionals pushing for a bill that would make it illegal for companies to withhold this information. Where the biggest names once had a monopoly on repairs, now independent repair shops and other repair enthusiasts were challenging the status quo.

Reasons favoring the Right to Repair

What’s driving this argument for consumer rights? Well, things have changed. Many people are heavily reliant on technology, at home and in the workplace. Some see the right to repair as a way to check the rights of rich companies. Why must the average cell phone user purchase a new phone every 3-4 years? What if we don’t actually want a new phone?

Another angle is less about the rights of companies, but simply about the art of repair. Whether it’s a hobby or a way of life, you know how to, have the tools to, and want to fix the items you own.

For others, it’s part of a large debate around sustainability. It isn’t good for the environment to continue to produce brand new products while chucking devices that have a minor issue that, theoretically, could be fixed with little effort—except certain companies prevent this.

Another angle of the right to repair is to balance out existing digital divides between classes and neighborhoods of people.

For example, roughly 90,000 homes in Baltimore don’t have access to the internet, and 75,000 homes lack a desktop or laptop computer—a typical situation in cities across America.

In the digital age, everything runs on internet connectivity: applying to jobs, looking for a new house, paying your bills. Gary Bonner, Executive Director of PCs for People, says that by rebuilding devices and computers, precisely what his organization does, he can give more people access to online opportunities.

(Explore more ways for technology to become more sustainable.)

Who is affected by the Right to Repair movement?

The growing Right to Repair campaign is wide-reaching and touches on everyone who has any part in the development or purchase of products and electronic goods: from customers and the independent repair shops to manufacturers such as Samsung and Apple.

Consumers & the Right to Repair

Consumer devices belong to the consumers. It is in the public interest to make the way to repair them available to the public and hold companies that fail to support customers to account. A law would protect consumers from planned obsolescence.

When someone damages a phone, it should be their right as the owner to attempt to fix it. If you need to replace a cell phone every time it works sub-optimally or ceases work altogether, do you even truly own the phone?

Proponents of the Right to Repair movement say no, it’s more like renting the phone from a company that will eventually stop promising upkeep of the gadget eventually.

Independent repair shops

Arguably, the independent repair shops stand to make the most from a successful Right to Repair campaign. That explains why independent repair shop owners are among the most vocal supporters of new legislation.

Repair shops believe that they should be able to acquire something as simple as a battery to help a person get more out of their phone or computer. As more and more pressure builds on mega-corporations, some companies have begun supplying parts and tools to selected repair shops.

Equipment manufacturers

The growing campaign is a worry for some manufacturers. They view their parts and guides as proprietary, so they don’t want these guides to be released to the public. They believe this information is a company or trade secret.

One of the most notable examples of this is Apple’s creation of a proprietary screw that prevented users from opening their own devices without specialized equipment (another cost).

For other companies, though, this argument for proprietary information isn’t too important. For example, Dell and Patagonia happily release guides and parts for every device or product that they produce to users. All the essential tools and access to guides for successfully repairing a device are provided to people capable of carrying out repairs.

Right to Repair legislation today

The Right to Repair movement varies from country to country. Here’s what Right to Repair could mean for legislation in the U.S. and Europe.

In the U.S.

As large companies such as Apple and Tesla lobby against the Right to Repair, the laws that repair enthusiasts need are becoming more and more difficult to push through.

Across various states, bills like S.4473 are being passed to ensure that necessary equipment in hospitals can be repaired without the need for lengthy approval processes. This bill means that capable people attempting emergency repairs no longer infringe on copyright standards.

In Europe

In an effort to reduce technological waste, the E.U. approved a directive that every important component and tool that’s necessary to fix a damaged device must be made available to E.U. citizens. This means that mega-corporations will have to cooperate if they plan to sell in EU countries.

From 2021, in order to adhere to this law, companies must provide parts to independent repair workers for up to 10 years after the product was initially released.

Customer vs manufacturer

The Right to Repair is a keen battle between the customer and the manufacturer, but it seems that the consumer might have more power going forward. This means more rights to open pull, unlock, and repair the electronics that they buy—and less of a monopoly for manufacturers.

Independent repair shops and any concerned consumer can fight back against companies through Right to Repair legislation. Though the proposed and applied laws vary, the aim to end a monopoly on repairs and make repair information something that we can all use.

Related reading

• BMC Business of IT Blog
• How Enterprise Asset Management Works
• Why Mainframes are Key to Green IT & Environmentally Sustainable Computing
• Application & Platform Legacy Modernization: Benefits & Risks
• Top Tech Gifts for IT Pros, Tech Enthusiasts & WFHers
• Making Environmental Stewardship a Priority for Business

In 1982, Alan Kay famously stated:

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware”.

And in this age of cloud and mobile, where we rarely interact with servers and network equipment, it might be easy to think they are no longer as useful as before.

But the hard truth is that good hardware remains the bedrock for all technology services. That’s why having an approach that effectively manages the lifecycle of hardware assets is critical, whether it’s for your own organization or for others, in a hosted arrangement.

Let’s explore hardware asset management and how it works for your organization.

(This article is part of our Sustainable IT Guide. Use the right-hand menu to explore topics related to sustainable technology efforts.)

What is a hardware asset?

An asset is any item, thing, or entity that has potential or actual value to an organization. That’s according to ISO.

Value here is about benefits for the organization:

• Value is usually financial in nature, as seen in the balance sheet, when as asset is used to generate revenue, reduce costs, or mitigate risk.
• Value can also be non-financial when it’s used well, such as customer satisfaction.

Hardware assets in IT service management refers to assets that are tangible in nature—those you can touch and feel. Hardware assets include those that are in use as well as those in storage.

Some examples of hardware assets, as listed in ITIL^® 4, include:

• End-user devices: personal computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and SIM cards
• Network and telecom equipment: routers, switches, load balancers, and video- conferencing and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) systems
• Data center hardware: servers, storage and backup systems, utilities, and security equipment
• Significant peripherals: personal printers, monitors, scanners, and multifunction printing systems

(Explore the related practices of IT asset management and enterprise asset management.)

Benefits of hardware asset management

Hardware assets can be expensive to procure, configure, maintain, and secure. They also require significant management effort and they depreciate rapidly.

Organizations that successfully execute Hardware Asset Management as a discipline often experience enterprise-wide improvements in their operations, and ultimately their bottom lines. These benefits include:

• Improved business agility
• Increased asset lifespan
• Reduced overheads
• Increased operational efficiency

Using automated systems for managing hardware assets, including IoT, can go a long way in raising productivity by:

• Reducing the management effort required
• Enhancing security and providing visibility in asset use, which can support decisions around improving operational efficiency and effectiveness.

Hardware asset management lifecycle

The same standard defines asset management as the coordinated activity of an organization to realize value from assets.

This coordination covers the acquisition, use, and disposal of assets, as described in the hardware asset management lifecycle from ITAM:

Let’s look at each phase.

1. Specify

Hardware planning is usually driven by two perspectives. On the one hand, there is data from business or customer side that is indicative of strategy and demand that influence capacity and type, while on the other hand there is technical aspects driven by evolution, incidents, problems, and continuity factors.

A hardware asset plan will capture these two perspectives, and consolidate the information into a concise approach that meets the priorities of the organization.

Once you’ve identified the priorities, budgeting is the next logical step. Of course, the business plays the bigger role in the decision-making process based on how much funding is available for hardware assets.

Budget will also be determined by preferred acquisition role as upgrades and leasing are considerably cheaper compared to outright purchase.

(See how capital and operating expenses play out over time.)

2. Acquire

Following the budget, the procurement process kicks in.

In this phase, you’ll have to write specifications for hardware to a sufficient detail in order to:

• Ensure the selected vendors understand what you need
• Guarantee that your organization receives bids that meet its needs.

Key determinants of which vendors you’ll select usually include:

• Compatibility with other assets, existing or planned
• Warranty
• Technical support

Procurement will ensure the contract captures elements of support under the service level agreement (SLA).

One alternative to acquisition is to bring your own device (BYOD). In this model, users provide their own computing devices, which will be:

• Logged by the corporate body
• Provided access to internal systems subject to the relevant information security policies

Upon receipt of the hardware assets, your organization must log them in a fixed asset register for financial reasons. This ensures that the financial value from the asset is:

• Captured for financial reporting
• Depreciated year on year

You’ll also tag the asset with the appropriate tagging mechanism, then store the asset in preparation for dispatch and assignment.

3. Deploy

The next step, before dispatching and assigning the asset, is to capture the hardware asset as a configuration item

in the relevant IT service management system or register. This supports and device servicing, when necessary, by logging the information needed to support monitoring and maintenance activities by designated IT and vendor support teams.

For end user hardware assets, deployment means either:

• Configuring, dispatching, and assigning assets to the user at their designated work area, including home for purposes of remote work.
• Having the users collect their devices from IT.

For security reasons, you might:

• Issue asset passes to facilitate movement in and out of buildings
• Require users to sign an acceptable use policy before handing over the asset

For corporate hardware assets, deployment means:

1. Moving the assets from storage.
2. Using the change management process to configure, install, and integrate assets into the live environment.

IT specialists or vendors would conduct these deployment activities. Internal teams, including security specialists and systems audits, then handle the validation process.

4. Service

At this step, you carry out maintenance of the hardware asset. This usually happens either as:

• Scheduled maintenance carried out by IT specialists or vendors in line with contract SLAs.
• A response to events, incidents, and problems that require remedial actions.

To support maintenance, an essential activity is spares management, ensuring that faulty parts can be restored quickly and effectively.

Servicing will also include necessary upgrades and patches, which are subject to the existing change management process.

Financial management will track the usage of the asset and compute depreciation as part of annual statutory financial reporting.

5. Retire

Once the hardware asset reaches its useful end of life or is unserviceable, it will then be decommissioned, and then considered for disposal as a logical final step. Decommissioning can also be triggered by:

• Employee exit (considering BYOD)
• Security or audit advisory regarding vulnerabilities or compromise

Decommissioning is a sensitive process when it comes to corporate hardware assets. As such, manage decommissioning using the existing change management processes. Status of the asset should be updated in the IT service management system or hardware asset register.

Before disposal, a security check is required to ensure that the asset is wiped of any corporate information. Specialized techniques might be required to ensure that any data contained in drives is irrecoverable.

Disposal could involve:

• Returning, as in the case of leased assets
• Selling, in the case where the asset still has some financial value

Some organizations consider donations to other institutions, e.g. for education or charity.

Finally, update the asset records to reflect the exit of the hardware asset from the organization.

Hardware asset management is a critical practice

Hardware asset management isn’t a practice for later. With ramifications around employee productivity, financial health, and overall security, hardware asset management is a critical activity for every organization.

Related reading

• BMC Service Management Blog
• IT Asset Management: 10 Best Practices for Successful ITAM
• IT Asset Management vs Software Asset Management: What’s The Difference?
• Software Asset Management: Mistakes, Truths & Best Practices in SAM
• Mobile Device Management (MDM): An Introduction
• What Is ADDM? Application Discovery & Dependency Mapping Explained

Sustainability and IT are at odds. Server farms—the backbone of every internet search and every sent email—take up tons of resources. If you’ve ever wondered how your device got made or where your laptop goes when you recycle it, you’ll understand how much energy is spent and greenhouse gases (GHG) are emitted. Still, there are ways that both companies and individuals can be more sustainable when it comes to IT. Let’s take a look.

(This article is part of our Sustainable IT Guide. Use the right-hand menu to explore topics related to sustainable technology efforts.)

How IT affects resources

We’re all vaguely aware of how IT affects resources. In the office, desktops, laptops, and servers rely on constant energy sources. But it’s not just the consumption of resources—these devices are responsible for significant GHG emissions. This is particularly true at the beginning of a device’s life, when it is being built. In fact, 81% of the energy a computer requires over its lifetime is expended during the building phase.

Once the technology is in your office, though, the energy consumption doesn’t stop. Most devices generate heat, particularly servers, so additional energy is often required in order to cool computing equipment.

Why sustainable IT matters

Sustainability isn’t just a buzzword anymore; it’s a way of life the world will need to adopt to curb climate change. Sustainability refers to a number of practices, including reducing our reliance on certain energies, limiting our GHG emissions, and changing how we shop or commute.

Businesses must consider sustainability as making decisions based the ethics and responsibility of your business, from your ecological footprint to your global business practices. Then there’s the business cost: the energy you pay for that runs your IT infrastructure alone is a significant percent of your overall expenses.

Despite relying on technology, companies that are in non-tech sectors tend to be more wasteful than technology companies. That’s because non-tech firms may be less aware of the sustainability that smarter, cutting edge tech can offer.

Importantly, promoting your company for its sustainable efforts might not result in cheaper business processes, but doing the right thing is increasingly important for customers—so championing greenness can improve your brand’s image. (Global retailer Patagonia is a great example.) Note that sustainability shouldn’t be used merely as a marketing mirage; instead, sustainable practices should be incorporated in your business processes.

Ways IT can be green

Most companies have given little thought to how to scale back their environmental impact. According to Stanford, the energy that powers individual workstations can be reduced anywhere from 17-74 percent. Even when we turn off and unplug our computers and devices, technology is involved in huge output. So, what can we do?

Here are ways that companies and departments can make an impact towards sustainable IT:

• Relocate (and collocate) servers. Maximize your data center space as much as possible to minimize your cooling and energy costs. If realistic, relocate your servers to colder climates for 8% reduction in GHG emissions.
• Follow data center best practices, such as:
  • Harness outside air cooling.
  • Automate controls for lights, security, and outdoor cooling.
  • Do not over-cool; cool to the minimum necessary.
  • Separate aisles based on hot and cold temperatures.
  • Aim for a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.2 or lower.
  • Unplug and remove zombie servers, the ultimate consumers: servers which are plugged in and using energy but aren’t doing any computing.
• Migrate to the cloud. Cloud energy tends to be more efficient because of economic of scale. (Although some research does challenge this.)
• Use state-of-the-art IT. Legacy systems can require more power and their large sizes often mean outsized heat output—requiring additional cooling. Tools like BMC Discovery can help you manage your assets, including releasing those that are no longer useful.
• Promote and purchase computers that are rated for energy efficiency. Groups like TCO Certified and Energy Star audit and certify factories and devices for their efficiencies and sustainable practices.
• Offer rebates or increased budgets to teams who promote sustainability. Some teams and departments at your company may be able to virtualize or work from home.
• Let individual teams determine the most applicable solutions for their needs. The Stanford research indicates that when teams can choose their options—instead of being mandated—they will see higher energy savings.

Ways individuals promote green IT

Of course, sustainable practices aren’t left entirely to companies. Individuals can reduce energy spent on their devices with these best practices:

• Set computers to sleep. Sleep is the lowest use of energy (besides powering down and unplugging). So, set monitors to turn off after 15 inactive minutes and hard disks even sooner: 5 minutes of inactivity. Your computer shouldn’t be awake after more than 30 minutes of activity.
• Upgrade to smart power strips. These smart strips cut down on vampire energy that computers, TVs, and peripheral devices all consume.
• Share printers. Whether at home or the office, consider how often printers are necessary. Who can you share with?
• Work remotely. Unless your daily commute is by foot (walking or biking), try working from home to reduce GHG emissions associated with commuting—with approval from your boss, of course.

Is green growth possible?

A popular belief is that economic growth and sustainability are compatible—an idea known as green growth. Many climate activists disagree, and research is starting to show that in order for us to protect our environment, one of three sustainability pillars, we may have to “liberate ourselves” from economic development. This doesn’t mean stopping economic activity, but it should mean that we reevaluate certain industries and our own companies and practices to ensure that we don’t produce or consume more than we are right now. Indeed, a closed-loop supply chain may be the best way forward.

Additional resources

At first glance, mainframes and green IT seem to be complete opposites. Green IT is the idea of incorporating sustainable actions plus renewable sources into technology, but mainframes are massive, resource-heavy machines.

On the contrary, industry trends indicate that not only are mainframes not yet dead, they’re actually becoming more important to large businesses. Though reasons for this aren’t inherently related to green IT, mainframes are a good argument for improving sustainability in any company’s technology.

(This article is part of our Sustainable IT Guide. Use the right-hand menu to explore topics related to sustainable technology efforts.)

What is green IT?

Green IT, sometimes known as green computing or environmentally sustainable computing, is the intersection of technology and environmental sustainability. Though computers and the internet are today’s efficiency currencies, they generally aren’t as efficient as they could be.

Computers, smart devices, and other hardware rely on raw materials for manufacturing. Then, the hardware requires natural resources the power them. When a computer or phone is replaced by a newer model, disposal becomes a significant problem, with few best answers or practices. For larger pieces of machinery, like servers and mainframes, each piece of tech has a wider footprint, as the rooms that store them often require ample power supplies and correct cooling – another strain on natural resources.

As such, goals for green IT include reducing the reliance on hazardous materials (often used to build IT hardware), maximizing energy efficiency (over the entire lifecycle), and improving the biodegradability or recyclability once a product reaches the end of its lifecycle. Strategies towards green IT include improving the longevity or lifecycle of a product, designing data centers more efficiently, optimizing software and deployment, managing power resources, and recycling products and materials.

The rise (and fall?) of mainframes

Mainframes have been around since the advent of computing. Initially, nearly all computers were mainframes, but, thanks to innovations, mainframes have switched to becoming more of a “master computer”, used by large organizations for important functions and applications like bulk data and transaction processing, enterprise resource planning, and more. A single mainframe often supports numerous devices, like servers, workstations, and other peripherals. (By contrast, casual computers like your home laptop or desktop don’t require mainframes.)

Rising costs and significant maintenance meant mainframes were harder to justify. Plus, companies churned through mainframes, replacing them with cheaper and faster versions. Among many threats over the decades, cloud computing seems most likely to render mainframes obsolete.

Developing technologies often follow the same rise and fall: a new technology is developed thanks to technologies before it, and it takes some time for the new product to be adapted. Once it is developed by the public at large, it may become ubiquitous and seemingly irreplaceable – until something comes along and interrupts the entire structure.

Cloud computing seems to be doing just this. Countless predictions hail cloud computing as the next, new technology, making actual machines unnecessary. Instead, we’ll rely on much lighter devices like laptops, smartphones, tablets, and more. Interestingly, this total switch has yet to occur. Despite companies and individuals migrating their work and products to the cloud, mainframes are actually on the rise among certain customers.

In 2017, IBM, a long-time builder of mainframes, reported its first growth in revenue in five years, with only a quarter of that increase coming from cloud revenue. Surprisingly, more than two-thirds of IBM’s revenue growth came from their Z Systems mainframes – meaning more people are buying mainframes now than in the last several years.

No longer are mainframes the computer machines of the mid-1900s: the size of a room, bulky, and slow. Today’s mainframes are much larger than a normal computer, but generally don’t take up much floor space, barely beyond the size of a single server. These sleek versions are significantly speedier at batch processing and transactions.

So, what’s driving the increased use of mainframes? Modern versions that are essential to centers that fuel big data analysis and cloud computing often run Linux. This open-source operating system makes using a mainframe no different than using Linux on every other platform. Because IT departments no longer need experts in a single mainframe, companies can better understand the master machines and better integrate them into their business needs.

Mainframes and efficiency

Interestingly, Linux isn’t the only reason for increased mainframe use. IBM’s Z Systems, for instance, have a flexible architecture with multiple chips built in, allowing for 140+ configurable processing units. This firmware means that the mainframe itself – not the operating system – can move a process to the right configuration so that is handled in the most efficient manner. (A Linux environment, for example, doesn’t even need to know that the firmware is relocating processes for efficiency.)

Such functionality is key to efficiency. If efficiency in technology is any device that can handle more data and processing with fewer resources, then mainframes can’t be beat. In fact, mainframes generally have the highest resource utilization rates across all hardware: mainframes frequently exceed 95% of their resource utilization. This means that practically everything is in use, which means you need fewer additional hardware products, which reduces your carbon footprint and energy thresholds. (By contrast, other IT systems are designed to run at no more than 70% capacity or less, saving the rest of their resources for self-generated tasks like clean up and maintenance.)

Today’s mainframes are much smaller, which can significantly reduce the financial and natural resources spent on cooling and power. Reduced sizes also offer major cost savings on real estate, especially in tech-heavy cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle.

In the past, weather-related disasters were often a death sentence for mainframes, as a loss or surge of power could knock out the mainframe and any connected devices. But current models are sturdy in disaster recovery situations. Mainframes can topple over and continue working and, in cases of power loss, they can be restored from remote backups in under 24 hours

Lastly, the lifecycle of mainframes is longer than ever, often running 10 or more years, nearly twice as long as most other business-necessary devices. Sure, building and running mainframes requires plenty of resources, but compared to a cluster of servers or devices that each require power and resources, mainframes still come out on top.

Determining when a mainframe is right for you

If you’re a small company or a start-up, a mainframe may be overkill. Many organizations that run data centers or heavy, frequent processing rely on them, like banks and financial institutions and companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Still, if you’re in need of the reliability and processing capabilities of such a machine, go beyond a mere financial standpoint to determine if a mainframe is right. Consider the business and technical perspectives – a common rule of thumb is that when you are migrating at least 20 or so servers to a mainframe, the mainframe becomes a financial advantage.

Of course, remember the impact your decisions have on the environment, too: a mainframe that offers more computing efficiency over a longer lifecycle means you’re getting the most out of natural resources without simply churning and burning them.