Note to Vendors: Please Help Us Be Green

Posted by Justin Wiebe, Fortiva Operations

I recently returned from a trip to Europe where I visited data centers in several countries. Almost everyone talked about the environment, carbon neutral computing and the possibility of governments starting to tax businesses based on their computing carbon footprint. This was a refreshing contrast to my experiences in North America where there is lots of press about ‘Green Computing’, but not too much action.

Here at Fortiva, we have been putting a lot of emphasis on minimizing our footprint. Not just because it is good for the environment, but also because the economics make sense. Over the past few years, we have managed to reduce our power consumption in a number of different ways:

• Using AMD processors and lower-power SATA drives has allowed us to reduce our power usage per GB stored from 0.2 W to 0.05 W
• Virtualization in our Development and QA environments has reduced the number of servers by approximately one-fifth. 
• Investing in remote management solutions reduces the number of visits we make to our data centers.
• And, as I opened with, we are looking into our vendor’s  ’greenness ‘.

Looking at this list of changes, it seems like we have made a lot of progress over the past few years. Unfortunately, it still feels like we have a long way to go. I have come up with a wish list of changes I would like to see our vendors make to help us achieve our goals:

• Ship less junk with each server:  For every server we receive, we probably throw away a third of the total weight shipped. Packaging, cable management kits, mounting brackets for non-standard racks, and documentation that no one reads goes directly into the dumpster. Some of our more enlightened data centers encourage recycling, but no one seems to take the time to sort the mess. Add the extra fuel used to ship the servers as a result of this excess weight, and eliminating these extras would save us all money.
• Act like a global company: One of our server suppliers recently announced that they will no longer ship a server purchased in Canada directly to a US address. What this means for us is that when we order a server for one of our US data centers, the manufacturer ships it from the US factory to our Canadian office, where we turn around and ship it back.
• Offer us older hardware:  Newer isn’t always greener – or even necessary. In many cases, we can use older, lower power consuming CPUs to power our storage servers. We just can’t get them.

I am sure there a lots of things I have left off this list that may make more sense for your company. Think about them, and the next time your vendor’s rep asks if there is any way they can help you, you’ll have something to share with them.