SustainableIT Newsletter - Issue #2

So Much Energy

It’s the end of the day and you notice the battery on your mobile is at 10%, so you switch to low power mode to make sure you will have enough power to call home later. The display is dimmed, non essential functions are shut down and all those apps that were refreshing in the background pause their activity, which sustains your battery long enough for that last and most important call of the day.

Now picture the worlds most sustainable data centre….what do you see in your minds eye? Solar panels? Windmills? Maybe geothermal energy, a data centre on the moon or at the bottom of the ocean??

The computing power of an iPhone 4 far exceeds the capabilities of the first data center , and how the iPhone manages power also illustrates an important concept for sustainableIT. When you switched to low power mode did you stop to consider whether or not the power originally came from a renewable source? Just like the data centre in your pocket, running IT infrastructure and operations in a sustainable way requires us to consider much more than where the power comes from.

What’s Next?

Companies such as Green Mountain have proven we can build data centers that run on 100% renewable power and others like Flexidao and Google are developing innovative new models to optimize renewable consumption in real time. While computing infrastructure has also increased in terms of efficiency over time, the end of Moore’s law requires more careful consideration of specialized architectures and more focus on advancing software driven performance gains.?

So where are the areas that those of us who don’t build servers or data centers can drive a comparable level of sustainability innovation? We can address application performance and efficiency while we also enable and verify sustainability reporting and opportunities.

Demand Change

Compared to how data centers source their energy, the way that IT workloads consume energy is an area that gets much less focus. Yet rearchitecting an application to make it cloud native will optimize resource consumption to reduce both carbon and cost . Meaning that cloud transformation and the shift to on demand consumption should be at the core of sustainability strategy because the business case already exists even before sustainability is considered.?

Studies have consistently shown that the most common factors holding back digital transformation efforts are controlling costs and dealing with security and privacy issues. These issues are similar to most other sustainability challenges in the sense that that they require improvements in optimization and governance to reduce resource consumption and risk. This illustrates that sustainability should be an integrated IT performance measure for everything from application development to infrastructure and operations rather than a separate consideration.

Similarly the use of IoT sensors and other technologies to shift and reduce demand is one of the key enablers of renewable power by helping to overcome the challenges of intermittency and storage. The magnitude of opportunities to transform business operations and the potential sustainability impact of continuous improvement gives IT a vital role to play in driving energy decarbonization that goes well beyond just running cleaner data centers.?

Be Curious

I’ve launched this newsletter with two short articles and a range of links that question the focus on net zero and renewable energy because I want to shift the conversation around sustainableIT. Why do we need this shift? Because there are market forces narrowing the definition of sustainability in order to simplify the issue and strengthen the impact of corporate messaging around concepts such as being “carbon neutral”.

While it is hard to blame marketers for trying to keep things simple and accentuate the positive, a lack of transparency and integrity in sustainability reporting suggests that there is an important role technologists can play to make sustainability a more credible and data driven endeavor. Ultimately sustainability is a function of systems rather than products and this means we have to look past valuable but simplistic marketing driven concepts like a zero emissions car.?

Next week I will explore how a systems thinking mindset, combined with a dose of optimism around the potential for the net positive impact covered in my first issue, is a foundation for sustainableIT. I hope you find the sustainableIT newsletter useful and welcome your comments and suggestions.