Kenneth G. Brill

Kenneth G. Brill

10/21/2009 @ 6:00AM

Why Data Centers Aren't Energy Hogs

London city government will soon begin publishing energy consumption by street address. CIOs will be unflatteringly featured on this list because London is filled with the data centers of major financial institutions, and these data centers can consume up to 35% of the entire enterprise energy. This conspicuous consumption is likely to prompt picketing by environmental activists and negative news stories. If other cities and countries emulate London in shaming large energy users, CIOs may find themselves regularly spotlighted on the nightly news.

To avoid a public relations nightmare, CIOs, CEOs and boards of directors must start right now to develop arguments and empirical evidence for why the energy consumed by IT is more than offset by energy savings in other parts of the corporation or in society.

One of the critical environmental arguments IT must be able to make is that moving “bits” instead of “atoms” is significantly more energy efficient. What this means is that creating and transferring information digitally (bits) using IT is more energy efficient than physically moving paper or people (atoms). An obvious example is holding a meeting via video conferencing, Skype or GoToMeeting, rather than people traveling to meet in-person. After years of sputtering attempts, this form of energy substitution is now really taking off and makes “virtual officing” anywhere in the world feasible.

While electronically moving bits instead of physically moving atoms intuitively would seem to be much more energy efficient, not much has been done to validate this very important assumption. One reason is the research is not easy. Clear-cut business process or product lifecycle comparisons between bits or atoms alternatives involves uncharted scientific analysis to capture the enterprise or society-wide energy and CO2 cradle-to-grave consequences. Fortunately, one comprehensive study has recently been published by Jonathan Koomey and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University entitled “The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods.”

While a fairly dry tomb of 23 pages with 39 references to other academic works, “Different Music Delivery Methods” is very important to CIOs and boards of directors because it is the first of what I hope will be a stream of research supporting the thesis that energy spent in the data center is good for our economy and society. Koomey exhaustively looked at all the energy consumed and CO2 created in the process of the electronic delivery of a music album via digital download (bits) vs. the more traditional method of producing and shipping a physical CD (atoms). The conclusions of the research illustrates how energy spent in IT offsets large amounts of unmeasured energy that would have otherwise been spent in the rest of the economy.

Koomey and colleagues looked at a total of six delivery alternatives–three for atoms and three for bits. The atoms choices included a consumer purchasing a CD at a store or online. The bits choices included digital downloading to an iPod or similar device where the music is stored in an electronic file or downloading the file and burning it to a CD. Each alternative was evaluated for consumer travel, last mile delivery, delivery packaging, retail store energy, ground and air freight, warehouse energy, data center energy, customer computer energy, CD case production and CD production.

The most energy-efficient alternative that produced the smallest carbon emissions was digital downloading to an iPod type device. The most energy inefficient and most CO2 producing by a factor of five was the consumer purchasing the CD at a retail store. Bits wins over atoms!

Despite the energy benefit to society, IT looks like a very conspicuous bad guy because virtually all the energy for the digital alternative is consumed in the data center and Internet where it is very visible and subject to reporting and regulation by street address. In contrast, three times more energy is spent by the consumer physically going to the retail store, but this is invisible and not easily counted.

CIOs and boards of directors must be prepared to effectively argue they are good corporate citizens despite ever-increasing IT energy consumption. Politicians, regulators and the public will need to be educated on how IT saves energy across an enterprise or in society.

Hundreds of scientific studies like Koomeys’ are going to be required. Industry associations, companies, government and academia will need to work together gathering evidence to further validate that bits are more beneficial to society than atoms.

Ken Brill is the executive director of the Uptime Institute.

See Also:

It’s Sputnik, Stupid!

Defending The Data Center

The CIO And CFO Disconnect

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