Focus: Reaching for green shoots
Technology for a greener and more sustainably profitable future is available through the channel, finds Fleur Doidge
Partners are helping companies grow greener businesses with a view to future economic growth
Technological solutions to the problems caused by climate change are well within our grasp, according to a July report for the Major Economies Forum in Italy by former PM Tony Blair.
The report calls for achievable short-term measures, specifically energy efficiency, a halt to deforestation and development of lower-carbon power and investments in further technology developments. It said these measures are needed to slash CO2 emissions 50 to 85 per cent by 2050.
What’s more, the report noted that low-carbon technologies also offer substantial job creation and growth potential, giving countries that act towards its goals a way out of what may yet be tougher times.
There is a simply enormous range of products and services that can boost energy efficiency and the like, from diverse vendors that are targeting many markets through the channel. Resellers have a key role, cherry-picking from a smorgasbord of options to produce the optimum solution for customers.
Jacqui Davey, vice president of the UK business partner organisation at IBM, said its Premier Business Partner Apex recently helped Devon-based mail order tools and machinery retailer Axminster Tool Centre lower its energy use by 30 per cent.
The family-run business reportedly had serious performance issues with its datacentre. Not only were the servers underperforming, but they were underutilised meaning costs were increasing and orders were taking a long time to fulfil.
Apex proposed a virtualisation programme, to enable the company to manage its servers better, gaining improved resilience across its network and greater energy efficiency.
“Virtualisation is the creation of a virtual, rather than actual, version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources,” said Davey. “By deploying an IBM server and installing virtualisation software, Axminster Tool Centre has taken steps to consolidate its IT infrastructure, become a greener company and open itself to new business opportunities.”
The customer not only saved energy costs but its IT infrastructure can cope more easily with new projects without having to add more servers. The efficiency gains are wide-ranging, with application implementation taking minutes where previously it had taken weeks. Axminster Tool Centre has also freed up real estate, giving its operation room to expand and develop.
According to IBM, many medium-sized firms plan to virtualise their servers, consolidate their storage systems, or retrofit their server rooms between now and March 2010.
“And we have things such as the Tivoli energy management software, that manages all the smart metering. There is a range of software and hardware products to address the changes on which clients are focusing,” said Davey.
Another Business Partner, Art of Computing, sold greater energy efficiency in an IBM Express Advantage package to hearing implant developer Cochlear, which has sold its devices to about 180,000 hearing-impaired people.
In the UK, the company’s dispersed, non-standardised infrastructure was starved for power and server management was getting more and more expensive.
“Art of Computing worked with Cochlear to design, test and implement a virtualised environment based on a standardised and scalable IBM Express Advantage infrastructure,” said Davey. “Managed centrally, the environment is already delivering a step change in energy efficiency, productivity and resilience.”
Power use has shrunk, reducing the carbon footprint. Eight servers were reduced to 15, with greater flexibility and scalability. On top of that, the set-up delivered improved disaster recovery for Cochlear.
Jon Godfrey, director of services at Sims Lifecycle Services, said his business, which offers a service that gives fresh life to old IT kit from businesses increasing environmental efficiency and cutting costs in the process is growing despite the recession.
“In total we are processing 30,000 to 35,000 units a month just in the UK,” he said. “We are finding that clients at the moment are focused on extracting every possible piece of value from their IT. So re-use is growing.”
What goes around
While the market is dependent on how much new kit is being sold into businesses and how much is being replaced or recycled, customers also want to do more with the hardware they have.
“We process everything from the datacentre right down to the desktop, mobile assets, telephones and communications technologies,” said Godfrey. “We even go right through to the big infrastructure products, dealing with mobile phone firms and telcos.”
Some pieces of hardware recently received by Sims have been refurbished before being sent back to work three or four times. Where possible, an item can be fixed up and reused, but if that is not possible it can be broken down and its component parts are recycled.
“It is a bit difficult to estimate growth, due to some acquisitions,” said Godfrey. “But a conservative estimate would be that we grew by 22 per cent last year, and that was in a falling [IT] market overall.”
Sims’ services are proving a good earner for VARs, resellers and distributors seeking to add value or an additional even recurring revenue stream.
“One of our big growth areas is the channel,” said Godfrey. “Some of the larger resellers have their own recycling and end-of-life businesses or own a business that does it. We are pushing hard to develop more relationships with people in the channel. Depending on how much value you add, margins can be about 30 per cent.”
Sims seeks reseller partners to offer its services as part of a cradle-to-grave solution for customers. For example, customers buying new kit could opt for a complete package that incorporates refurbishment or recycling when the time came, or perhaps one that includes a trade-in deal.
Public projections
In return, Sims offers support to the channel players unused to seeing hardware this way. To an extent, resellers are used to promoting and selling brand-new, neatly packaged products and then never seeing them again.
A shift in mindset is required, and Sims educates its partners on how to sell its services, and how to remarket refurbished gear as well as teaching them how to negotiate the various regulations and practices that must be followed around data security and hazardous waste.
“We destroy the data; we guarantee the data security and then we refurbish and repair and find it some new life, if you like,” said Godfrey.
Anthony Greenhalgh, IBM business unit director for power and storage at Avnet Technology Solutions, said the distributor has had several energy-efficiency-focused engagements with partners.
“Over the past two to three years, the majority of our larger deployments have been around energy efficiency, in many ways,” said Greenhalgh. “Most about 70 per cent of our deployments are around virtualisation.”
Technologies available have developed accordingly. The IBM BladeCenter family of blade servers has proven a hit with customers, partly because of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) benefits.
Different processor technologies -- x-86, POWER or Cell Broadband Engine -- processors and operating systems in the range let customers run diverse workloads inside a single architecture, reducing complexity and power consumption while easing systems management. Storage and networking options are integrated into the chassis.
Avnet is also seeing success with Big Blue’s XIV disk storage environment, based on a scalable grid of off-the-shelf components starting at 27TB. These have built-in thin provisioning and system virtualisation, as well as large-capacity SATA drives and disk capacity optimised for power consumption efficiency per TB. They are meant to be easy to administer and manage as well.
“And from the software point of view, Storage Volume Controller (SVC) allows users to virtualise what has been deployed already, so they can get greater efficiency with what they have,” said Greenhalgh.
Virtualisation is spreading to the desktop, but there are no specific products that can be recommended for resellers wanting to virtualise customers’ desktop infrastructures, he added.
“But we are seeing within our partner business a large increase in enquiries about how to start to deploy desktops in a new, more cost-effective way,” said Greenhalgh. “We are supporting them in doing that for their customers with IBM and third-party complementary products.”
Solutions involving a unified communications (UC) aspect are also becoming important in sales to Avnet customers seeking to get greener. UC can help make a communications infrastructure more efficient but can also enable staff to work remotely making for overhead savings across a customer’s business.
Green solution selling
Andy Lawrence, research director for analysis of eco-efficient IT at The 451 Group, said IT-related ways of cutting energy use are emerging all the time as customers get more interested in buying in.
“You can see that new investments in greener technologies are about the low hanging fruit it is about energy efficiency and also a realisation that saving energy is good for the bottom line,” he said.
Green technologies that sell well are likely to require low capital investment or have some capital advantages such as fast return on investment (RoI). Desktop power management software is an easy sell and is doing increasingly well as opposed to some technologies that might save lots of energy over time, but require a bigger outlay up front for cost-conscious companies.
That said, massive hardware manufacturers such as Intel have been targeting improved energy efficiency across their product sets for years, as the other kick-back is improved performance.
So users can get increased energy efficiency in other ways if they need the performance, they can swap older systems for new replacement hardware with greatly increased processing power, removing the need for additional kit.
“Chip technologies have become much more energy efficient and will continue to do so,” said Lawrence. “Also, server design generally has improved.”
In storage, de-duplication, which avoids unnecessary mass replication of data, and thin provisioning, which parcels out storage incrementally according to the demands of applications, have become increasingly important and uptake is not high yet.
A relatively new development called sleepy disks enables inactive hard drives to be targeted and sent to sleep, which consumes less power. One estimate suggests that perhaps 80 per cent of all data stored by an organisation is nearline or non-active and so can be put to sleep at least some of the time.
“Yet I don’t think these [technologies] play as important a role as the actual processing, which is really key. Clearly, the datacentre has traditionally been very inefficient,” said Lawrence.
A lot of work can be done to bring the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating down. PUE is found by dividing the total facility power by the total equipment power, to get a ratio of how much Wattage is used to keep the IT going, compared with what is needed to drive the datacentre itself.
For example, a PUE of ‘3’ means the facility demand is three times greater than that needed to power the IT, with the greatest possible efficiency a PUE of ‘1’.
“The PUE ratio is probably averaging about 2.5, and people are trying to bring it down to about 2,” said Lawrence. “And for new-build datacentres, people are aiming for 1.5 -- a significant improvement. Google gets it down to 1.2, but they build their own, design the whole thing and can maximise energy efficiency because they own their cooling systems.”
Cooling is critical in datacentre efficiency. A greener datacentre is likely to make use of free air cooling, where air say, through a window is allowed to circulate and cool the equipment. The Green Grid consortium released an online tool in April to help US firms work out how much money they could save by harnessing free air cooling.
“People want it but they don’t want to spend a lot of money with it,” said Lawrence.
Nick Culley, managing director of Midwich, said the green IT areas that stand out as opportunity areas for it are printer hardware, projection and document scanning. Printers made by vendors including Kyocera, Brother, Canon and Ricoh are increasingly coming in greener variations, thanks to a broad range of technological advances.
Public projections
Many offer print features aimed at helping customers enhance their businesses’ green credentials, by giving greater control over what is printed, how, when an d by whom. Most are more energy efficient, and several are designed to produce less waste when replaced.
The projection market is similar, with classrooms and corporates alike increasingly expected to reduce their carbon emissions.
“With projectors, we are seeing more ‘green’ features coming through from our manufacturers,” said Culley. “Lower power consumption is the main one, but we expect to see quite a lot more development in this regard. In classrooms, and in the public sector especially, they want to ensure the products they are using are not harmful to the environment.”
Document scanning is coming to the fore for Midwich as a product portfolio that is being invested in primarily for the increased efficiency and associated green benefits. Organisations that invest in scanners can meet onerous new regulatory stipulations around document archiving and data security while cutting back on resources such as paper and space.
This saves power and shrinks carbon footprints.
Managed print solutions will help clued-up resellers even more, with Ricoh’s new Click offering in particular set to meet customer demands while enabling greener printing operations.
“We are trying to drive a stronger green message through Midwich, and there is a very good story to tell,” said Culley. “I think there is a job for distribution in pushing vendors a bit harder for information about the greenness of IT. I think the buying criteria for greener products will get stronger and stronger.”
Chris Gabriel, solutions director at integrator and service provider Logicalis, said that corporate social responsibility is becoming fashionable once again, although it had been talked about less in recent years as businesses concentrated on cutting costs.
He stressed that the greenest solutions tend not to be about a product or specific offering, but the ability to create tailored solutions for individual organisational needs that increase efficiency and compliance for less cost and environmental damage.
“People then say, ‘double bubble; that’s great!’,” said Gabriel.
Mid-range consultancy
Consultancy is key, and resellers that succeed in green IT would do well to take note especially in a world where product margins may be merely microscopic.
Mid-range customers, especially with lots of Linux or mainframes used as a Linux consolidation engine, are keen to cut power consumption and go green.
“It’s about, ‘I’ve got a bunch of these; I want less of this’,” said Gabriel. “And that is consolidation up to a bigger platform as much as cramming it in.”
Managed IT services for the public sector can be fertile ground for such deals. Logicalis in March signed a seven-year £6m deal with Greenwich Council to upgrade and deploy LAN and WAN technologies, provide consultancy and boost operational efficiencies intended to support e-services provision during the 2012 Olympics.
Local authorities are under pressure to achieve cost and efficiency savings while offering competitive infrastructure and services. A more efficient, less costly infrastructure will almost certainly mean a greener one.
“We find that successful deals must fulfil at least a few but often all of these four criteria: improved agility, continuity, responsibility and governance,” said Gabriel. “The big driver is cash rather than carbon. However, carbon reduction commitments are going to lock in and that ends up as a cash imperative anyway.”