Why green really matters to business and government IT systems…
There is a timely article in New Zealand’s ComputerWorld this morning entitled “There’s growing cynicism about going green“, I ended up in exactly this discussion over the weekend with a friend who is visiting from the UK.
From the NZ ComputerWorld article;
Evidence is mounting of a growing cynicism regarding green initiatives within the IT infrastructure space. We may be reaching a point where vendor hype has hit saturation point and is beginning to meet with customer resistance. While there is a genuine concern about datacentre power consumption, particularly with regard to accommodating increasingly dense technology footprints, the larger concern for most, particularly in the current climate, is controlling costs.
… and that is exactly where our conversation ended up, companies and government will focus on green initiatives when it brings real business value and benefit.
“Green” is certainly vogue at the moment, as much technology circles as anywhere else. There has been plenty of discussion and announcements of late from companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft around what the companies are doing in their data centers to reduce the carbon footprint of high uptime service delivery.
Almost all of those stories are centered on how companies are cutting back or becoming more efficient as organizations to meet the demands of today’s society.
What does not seem to be emerging in these discussions is the great opportunity that this brings for technology as we know it today in the consumer and desktop space, and I really think there is a need for more public thought in this area.
The green initiatives that companies are driving today also have the obvious potential to impact technology that we use on a day to day basis in very positive ways.
As an example, I carry a Windows Mobile smart phone, it is a great multipurpose device with a host operating system that serves my personal productivity needs along with having the ability to run a range of entertainment, personal management and other communication tools from a wide array of vendors. Each of the applications I have installed draw on common operating system capability, power management capability and processor cycles.
The high speed multi-purpose processor that sits in the device is a single core that is ideal for most of these functions especially when an application draws on UI functionality, in some cases though it is huge overkill.
Think for a moment about what is needed to play music files on the device, currently drawing on all of the available facilities to do this is much more of a power drain than is needed and probably results in my only being able to listen to music for a short number of hours. Chip and device companies that are looking at how we might deliver a “music only core” into the central processor of my smart phone, drawing significantly less power off a single circuit and providing me with music for hundreds of hours between charges. The future may hold a different sort of multi-core technology than we know today, with a single generic core accompanied by specific cores for sound, communication and other discrete use cases.
That is a pretty lightweight example, but you can see where I’m heading. Today we’re designing very powerful multipurpose devices for every area of computing, tomorrow for some users that requirement will still be there, for others we will be able to look at the use cases that really matter to them and provide a very power efficient way of meeting all of those cases through a very disparate set of well integrated, purpose designed circuits.
The end result will not be reduced functionality, as some seem to assume green brings, but a much richer environment for the user and a huge new set of opportunities for both hardware and software.
Hopefully you will agree that now is the time for the industry to start to look at the opportunities that the “green” moniker brings to computing as we will know it in the future, as well as how we retrospectively address the power consumption requirements of today’s devices.
As we look at driving a reduction in the global carbon footprint of IT success will only come through focusing on the benefit that these scenarios bring to end users, developers and data center environments.
For the end user green is really about cost, speed, focused use of resources and as always more efficient delivery of services.
