Green and Sustainable Computing For System

Efficiency and Optimization

Carlson Holloway-Factory Jr.

The University of Arizona

The School of Information

ABSTRACT- This paper is a literary analysis focusing on many important factors for

reducing power and environmental waste and adopting Green Computing methods in general and

in regards to practically applying this information to a real world situation. This paper will take a

look at several green initiatives currently under as well as future outlooks. The intention of this

research is to inevitably gain a base of knowledge in order to develop a green plan for my

department at Student Affairs Marketing and to educate our employees on what they can do to

improve upon or impact in the ever growing field of green computing and discuss our options.

Key Words:

Green Computing, Green IT,

I. Introduction:

Green computing or green IT, refers to environmentally suitable computing or IT. It is the

study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and

associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and

communications systems—efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the

environment [1]. The rapid growth of Information technologies (e-commerce, social media,

online video, datacenters) has its own benefits and drawbacks. In terms of benefits, this rapid

growth of information technologies has brought significant improvements to humanity while its

major downside is the impact on the environment where computers and devices waste are

diminishing natural resources and spoiling the environment. In this context, researches seek to

discover new solutions to lower power costs and use computer resources in an efficient way

without contributing the further impact of new technologies through Green Computing

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technologies. Green IT also strives to achieve economic viability and improved system

performance and use, while abiding by social and ethical responsibilities. A central part of

reducing computing energy through environmentally sustainable computing involves the

understanding of Green Computing.

II. PROBLEMS BEING FACED WITHOUT GREEN COMPUTING

Today, with the ever-increasing impact of information Technology (IT) on the

environment can’t be ignored. So far, many consumers haven't cared much about ecological

impact when buying or using computers, but rather have cared only about speed and price. But as

Moore's Law inevitably marches on and computers commodities, consumers will become pickier

about being green. Devices use less and less power while renewable energy gets more and more

portable and effective.

The primary problems that are being faced by the increase in technology to our environment are:

Pollution - Air, water, heat and noise pollution can all be caused by producing and

using technology.

Consuming resources - Non-renewable resources such as coal, are used to generate the

electricity for technology. Contaminate the food chain can greatly affect the

environment's natural cycles.

Health hazards - Using toxic materials that can harm our health can cause cancer and

technology addiction can lead to other health problems like obesity and carpal tunnel

syndrome.

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Carbon emissions: carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are greenhouse gasses that are

produced by people. These greenhouse gasses trap in the atmosphere and reflect heat and

radiation back to the planet's surface, which leads to Global warming.

A recent Mckinsey report estimates that IT as a whole produces around 1 gigaton of

emissions a year, accounting for about two percent of all global emissions. At this rate

combined with the continuous demands, by 2020 emissions associated with IT will reach

around three percent of global emissions, which the report says is higher than the total

output of the United Kingdom today [2]. According to a report by Forrester Research, by

the end of 2008, there were over two billion PCs in use worldwide. As PC adoption

grows globally, it is estimated that there will be more than three billion PCs in use by

2016. It took 27 years to reach one billion but will only take 7 more years to double that

number. With this trend, something needs to change [2].

III. Current Trends in Green IT

Recently Green technology is gaining more public attention through the work of

environmental organizations and government initiatives. VIA is one of the first corporations to

concentrate on green computing that seems like less of a passing trend than a first step toward

significant changes in technology. IBM unveiled its Project Big Green, dedicated to increasing

energy efficiency across the company’s branches around the world. Experts say that businesses

will continue to invest in clean computing, not only because of future regulations, policies, and

social demands to reduce their carbon footprint, but also due to the significant long-term savings

it can produce.

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Many governments worldwide have initiated energy-management programs, such as Energy

Star, an international standard for energy-efficient electronic equipment that was created by the

United States Environmental Protection Agency and has now been adopted by several other

countries. Energy Star for instance reduces the amount of energy consumed by a product by

automatically switching it into “sleep” mode when not in use or reducing the amount of power

used by a product when in “standby” mode. Surprisingly, standby “leaking,” the electricity

consumed by appliances when they are switched off, can represent as much as 12 percent of a

typical household’s electricity consumption. Worldwide, standby power is estimated to account

for as much as 1 percent of global greenhouse emissions. Most of the energy used by products on

standby does not result any useful function. A small amount can be needed for maintaining

memory or an internal clock, remote-control activation, or other features; but most standby

power is wasted energy. Energy Star–enabled products minimize this waste. [3]

Computer giants in the industry currently utilize greener resources and harness green

technology to lessen if not minimize their carbon footprint.

IBM is a great non-government provider and it uses an Aquasar Cooling System- the

closed circuit cooling system has an energy efficiency of about 450 megaflops per watt while the

system uses hot water to reduce the power consumption of the supercomputer stationed at the

"Swiss Federal Institute Technology Zurich". The thermal power contributes additional energy of

nine kilowatts to the building’s heating system. [4]

HP Labs is also another good example with its Data Center in a Dairy Farm. Rural areas

are where animal manure power is abundant and HP Labs Design is utilizing a "Farm Waste

Data Center Ecosystem". This refers to a farm of thousands of cows that provide methane gas to

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power up a typical modern data center and the dairy farm. In addition, the data centers help the

other rural famers get rid of their farm wastes. [4]

Google’s also is an innovator in green IT and Sustainable Operations. Google, which

thrives on data centers, is well known for being at the forefront of advocating the benefits of

green computing. The company's data centers rely on Google-designed edifices that utilize only

half the energy used by a typical data center. Accordingly, the energy used per Google search

consumes only about 0.0003 kWh with roughly about 0.2g of CO2 emission. Google is out to

prove that sustainability in energy use is possible and is quite active in encouraging other data

centers to do the same. [4]

It’s known that the emissions given of by IT can’t fully be controlled but it’s useful to ask

and look into ways that can deliver computing in a more efficient and environmentally friendly

way.

IV. Future Trends

Looking at the big picture, growth in computing needs, energy cost and global warming is great

challenge for IT industry as a whole. The future of Green Computing is going to be based

primarily on efficiency, rather than reduction in consumption [5].

The primarily focus of Green IT is in the organization’s self interest in energy cost reduction, at

Data Centers and at desktops, and the result of which is the corresponding reduction in carbon

generation. The secondary focus of Green IT needs to focus beyond energy use in the Data

Center and the focus should be on innovation and improving alignment with overall corporate

social responsibility efforts. This secondary focus will demand the development of Green

Computing strategies. The idea of sustainability addresses the subject of business value creation

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while ensuring that long-term environmental resources are not impacted. There are few efforts,

which all enterprises are supposed to take care of [6]:

A. Certifications

There are several organizations providing certificates to green technology. Vendors are based on

their product quality, material, life of the product and recycling capabilities. In future such

certifications together with recommendations and government regulations will put more pressure

on vendors to use green technology and reduce the impact on environment.

B. Product Longevity

As per Gartner and Fujitsu reports on product life cycle it is obvious that the product durability

and/or longevity are one of the best approaches towards achieving Green Computing objectives

[2]. Long life of product will allow more utilization of products and it will put a control on

unnecessary manufacturing of products. It is obvious that government regulations will push the

products vendors to make more efforts to increase the product life.

C. Power Management Tools

Power management is proving to be one of the most valuable and clear-cut techniques in near

future to decrease energy consumption. IT departments with focus on saving energy can decrease

use with a centralized power management tool. Compiling data from Energy Star case studies for

7 deployments of 11,000 - 499,000 machines, it was found that sleep scheduling was able to save

between $10.75 and $95 per computer per year. These deployments used a combination

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Windows built-in sleep function, group policies, different software systems, such as PC Power

down, EZ GPO, Tivoli systems, BigFix etc. [5].

D. Leveraging Unused Computer Resource

One of the exiting areas where Green Computing can grow is the share and use efficiently the

unused resources on idle computers. Leveraging the unused computing power of modern

machines to create an environmentally proficient substitute to traditional desktop computing is

cost effective option. This makes it possible to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 15 tons per year

per system and reduce electronic waste by up to 80% [7].

E. Data Compression

In enterprise, huge amount of data that is stored is someway or other duplicated information.

Information System backups are true example of such duplicated data. Intelligent compression

techniques can be used to compress the data and eliminate duplicates help in cutting the data

storage requirements.

F. Applications

Green Computing is a diverse field and due to its nature and priority from all fields of life Green

Computing has applications in every sector of computing as the goal is to save the environment

and ultimately the life. The current main applications of Green Computing are covering

following computing sectors [8]:

• Equipment design;

• Equipment recycling;

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• Data Center optimization and consolidation;

• Virtualization;

• Paper free environment;

• Application Architecture; and

• Power Management

V. Implementing Green Computing Strategies at SAMK

Transitioning to more sustainable green computing at student affairs marketing has

involved a number of strategies to optimize the efficiency of our data operations in order to

lower costs and to lessen the impact of computing on the environment. Though we have a small

department of only 27 employees, it was discovered that we carry a big footprint on the

environment. For instance, some employees are using two monitors when it’s only necessary for

them to utilize one. Many of our older practices are very wasteful and it is my intention to use

my research to improve upon our current methods and create for the first in our office a green

plan to educate our staff of ways that they can maintain green practices. We focused on four

primary areas of concern.

To comprehensively and effectively address the environmental impacts of our

computing/IT, we must adopt a holistic approach and make the entire IT lifecycle greener by

addressing environmental sustainability along the following four complementary paths:

1. Data center infrastructure

Currently in student affairs marketing, our infrastructure equipment includes chillers, power

supplies, storage devices, switches, pumps, fans, and network equipment. Our data centers are

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currently over ten years old. Their infrastructure equipment is reaching the end of its useful life.

Which is why we are looking into using “Amazon Glacier Storage” services which I will discuss

more later. Our current methods are power hungry and inefficient. Data centers typically use 2 or

3 times the amount of power overall as used for the IT equipment, mostly for cooling. We

noticed that there was a lot of cool air being wasted because we didn’t have all of our panels

blanked out, but we plan on blanking out as many as possible. The obvious strategy here has

been to invest in new data centers that are designed to be energy efficient or to retrofit existing

centers but we are going with the former.

2. Power and workload management

Power and workload management software could save $25-75 per desktop per month and more

for servers [9]. Power management software adjusts the processor power states (P-states) to

match workload requirements. It makes full use of the processor power when needed and

conserves power when workloads are lighter. Some companies are shifting from desktops to

laptops for their power management capabilities, but many laptops do not have the necessary

specs necessary for us to operate on the tasks that we need.

3. Virtualization

Virtualization has become a primary strategy for addressing growing business computing needs.

It is fundamentally about IT optimization in terms energy efficiency and cost reduction. It

improves the utilization of existing IT resources while reducing energy use, capital spending and

human resource costs [10, 11]. Data center virtualization affects four areas: server hardware and

operating systems, storage, networks, and application infrastructure. For instance, virtualization

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enables increased server utilization by pooling applications on fewer servers. Through

virtualization, data centers can support new applications while using less power, physical space,

as well as labor. This method is especially useful for extending the life of older data centers with

no space for expansion. Virtual servers use less power and have higher levels of efficiency than

standalone servers [3]. With the use of a hardware platform virtualization program called a

hypervisor we are able to utilize multiple operating systems on a host computer. The hypervisor

controls access to the server’s processor and memory and enables a server to be segmented into

several “virtual machines”, each with its own operating system and application. With

virtualization, server workloads can be increased to 50-85 percent where they can operate more

energy efficiently [3]. Less servers are needed which means smaller server footprints, lower

cooling costs, less headcount, and improved manageability.

4. Cloud computing and services

As Internet-based computing centralizes in the data center, software technology has advanced to

enable applications to be used where and when needed. The term “cloud computing” refers to a

computing model that aims to make high-performance computing available to the masses over

the Internet [12]. Cloud computing will enable our team of developers to create, deploy, and run

easily scalable services that are high performance, reliable, and free the user from location and

infrastructure concerns [13]. When combined with “computing” the definition turns to services

[14]. As cloud computing continues to evolve it has increasingly taken on service characteristics.

As discussed previously we decided to go with Amazon Glacier Storage to archive our data to

replace our current data center. At $7 per Terabyte, we will be saving thousands of dollars

(according to our calculations $9000 per year to be exact). We also decided that we should adopt

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the Elastic block storage that amazon offers at $2 per month. They use Solid state drives, which

we can’t afford ourselves so we get to improve performance, but at the one tenth the cost of our

current storage centers. The “cloud” has long been a metaphor for the Internet. These services

include utility computing, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and

infrastructure as a service (IaaS). There are three types of cloud computing. We discussed each,

and for our environment we decided that Utility Computing as well as PaaS was best and most

cost effective for our model and plan.

Utility computing . The first cloud services were developed by companies such as

Amazon.com, Sun, and IBM that offered virtual servers and storage that can be accessed

on demand. This is often described as an updated version of utility computing—

essentially virtual computing capacity where users pay for what they use when they need

it. Early adopters used this service for supplemental and non mission-critical needs. This

model could be extended to include virtual data centers as a virtual resource pool [14].

SaaS: This implementation of cloud computing delivers applications through a browser

interface to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture [14, 15, 16].

Salesforce.com is perhaps the best known of the SaaS companies with applications in

sales force automation, CRM, human resources, and supply chain management. The

benefits for customers include: no upfront investment in infrastructure, servers, or

software licenses; reduced operating expenses, end-to end business processes integrated

with services anywhere/anytime; dynamically scalable infrastructure, SLAs for

composite services, mobile device and sensor control, access to leading-edge technology,

and less environmental impact [16].

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PaaS. An outgrowth of the SaaS model, PaaS delivers development environments as a

service [14]. The model provides the required resources to support the entire life cycle for

developing and delivering web applications and services over the Internet. Developers

can essentially create their own applications as a service that will run on the provider’s

platform and are delivered to their customers from the provider’s servers. Leading PaaS

companies are Force.com, Google AppEngine, and Microsoft Azure. The primary

advantages are the speed and low cost that can be achieved for development and

deployment [46]. IaaS. This cloud offering provides basic infrastructure, such as servers,

storage, clients, and networking as an on demand service. Leading IaaS companies

include Amazon Web Services, GoGrid, and Flexiscale [17]. The advantages include a

high degree of flexibility, low cost, pay as you go, access to the latest technology, faster

service delivery and time to market.

5. Direct Environmental Approaches:

After looking at the data, this was the area that we had the most control over contributing to.

After looking at the numbers, we discovered that we were printing approximately 21, 000 pages

a year (60,000 over the lifetime of this particular printer). 85% of those pages were in color. Of

the 61, 261 total, 1666were double paged. This all averages to about 66 pages per month, per

person. We decided we wanted to focus on reducing this number significantly with our green

plan. After doing more research, we discovered that we spend about $1575 (.9 per color page)

with 40 packs of 500 sheets per year. According to “http://conservatree.org/” at this rate, we are

burning around two trees per year. At a glance this doesn’t seem like too much, but this adds up

and easily can be improved upon.

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Some of the other topics we discussed while developing our green plan with the environmental

impacts in mind. (Many of these were things we were already doing or at least keeping in mind):

Green use — reducing the energy consumption of computers and other information

systems as well as using them in an environmentally sound manner.

Green disposal — refurbishing and reusing old computers and properly recycling

unwanted computers and other electronic equipment.

Green design — designing energy-efficient and environmentally sound components,

computers, servers, cooling equipment, and data centers.

VI. Conclusion

Certain things that I have discussed in this paper would have been nice to implement, but

where either outside of the scope of our work, or generally out of our control. An example of this

is how we only have access to specific parts of our data center as it is hosted by the entire

Student Unions. After discovering that we keep our temperatures at 51 degrees, I wanted to

discuss with my supervisor the possibility of raising this tempter to a higher one since most data

centers are chilled much more than they should be, therefore adding to the cost of the energy bill,

but also the cost of the environment as well. As I mentioned, this was something that my sector

had little control of. There were plenty other examples of places where we could have improved,

but I tried to focus more on what we could do, since we didn’t have a green plan , and passively

Technology is not a passive observer, but it is an active contributor in achieving the goals

of Green Computing. IT industry is putting efforts in all its sectors to achieve Green computing.

Equipment recycling, reduction of paper usage, virtualization, cloud computing, power

management, Green manufacturing are the key initiatives towards Green computing. Current

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challenges to achieve Green Computing are enormous and the impact is on computing

performance. Efforts of Governments and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) are also

appreciate-able. Government regulations are pushing Vendors to act green; behave green; do

green; go green; think green; use green and no doubt to reduce energy consumptions as well. All

these efforts are still in limited areas and currently efforts are mainly to reduce energy

consumption, e-Waste but the future of Green Computing will be depending on efficiency and

Green products. Future work in Green Computing discipline will also rely on research work in

academics since this is an emerging discipline and there is much more need to be done. There is

need for more research in this discipline especially within academic sector.

The benefits of green computing are clear. As the number of PCs approaches 2.5 Billion

by the end of 2016, the potential savings related to energy use, CO2 emissions and e-waste are

undeniable.

References

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[15] Guptill, B. and W. S. McNee, “SaaS Sets the Stage for Cloud Computing,” Financial Executive, pp. 37-44, June 2008. Retrieved April 2016[16] Reid, C. K., “SaaS: The Secret Weapon for Profits (and the planet),” Econtent Magazine, pp. 24-29, January-February, 2009. Retrieved March 2016[17] Sward, D., Measuring the Business Value of Information Technology, Intel Press, 2006. Retrieved April 2016

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