Kermit Says: “Green IT Is Green In Your Pocket”

“I don’t want to take on Kermit the Frog, but I don’t think it is tough being green if you are really committed to it,” said GSA ITS Assistant Commissioner John Johnson.

Being green takes a commitment. And while government has stepped up its efforts as a leader in implementing environmentally friendly practices, Johnson says to make a difference means embracing change right now.

“It is behavior, behavior, behavior!” says Johnson. “Changing behavior is something we can do right now, today. Just think of the savings if everyone turned off their monitor.  That would be significant.”

Johnson made his comments during the Federal Executive Forum on Green Government, produced by the Trezza Media Group and broadcast on Federal News Radio. Joining Johnson on the panel moderated by Jim Flyzik of The Flyzik Group were:

·         Molly O'Neill, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Environmental Information (OEI), Chief Information Officer (CIO), EPA

·         Catherine Cesnik, Senior Program Manager, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance, Department of the Interior

·         Myra Galbreath, Office Director and Chief Technology Officer, EPA

·         Tom Simmons, Area Vice President for Federal Systems, Citrix

·         Edward Vaccaro, Partner, Homeland Security, Federal Systems, Unisys

·         Erin Rae Hoffer, Industry Program Manager, Autodesk

During the broadcast, EPA’s Molly O’Neill and Myra Galbreath both talked about how far green had come in government. Just a few short years ago, the focus was on recycling print cartridges, now the focus is on how to be green throughout the entire IT lifecycle.

“We think of this as a lifecycle,” says O’Neill. “Green is always a moving target. First it was print cartridges, then we focused on recycling desktops, now it is virtualization and we’re looking for ways to reduce the footprint.”

O’Neill explains the lifecycle is 4 parts:

1. Building a green facility

2. Making green acquisitions

3. Optimizing performance (and thus reducing power consumption)

4. Green disposal.

Thinking green in terms of lifecycle makes decisions more complex; now we are getting down to green for each individual component even down to the chip.

This cradle-to-grave approach is the heart-and-soul of the Electronic Stewardship program. According to EPA, this “program area addresses the life-cycle management of electronics from procurement to disposal.” You can find links, documents, and case studies at Federal Electronics Challenge (FEC), the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), and Energy Star.

When it comes to awareness, research shows global warming ranks second to terrorism Galbreath says. “That is awareness in the way we are using, buying and disposing of things. The network is the computer and we are all connected.”

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Reducing your carbon footprint is what we are all striving for. Think about when we thought about computing being “always on”. But now a better thought might be computing at the “right time and right place, not anytime or anyplace” said Jim Flyzik of The Flyzik Group.

“I’m feeling guilty now when I don’t turn off my computer at night,” confessed  Flyzik. “Or even if I leave the power source in and am sucked up by “vampire” power consumption. (Vampire is when you leave power sources plugged in even though they are not connected to a device. They suck power even when plugged in.)

As a consumer, provider and consultant in this space, Unisys is keenly aware of its green responsibilities in the Data Center says Unisys’ Ed Vaccaro.  “Through a major green initiative and we reduced our carbon footprint by 67% and this is a data center we use for work that is outsourced to us including that from government.”

Vaccaro points out Unisys is taking those same experiences and technologies and offering to our clients. So, when working with government clients undergoing technology refreshes, Unisys is coming up with green strategies using virtualization and consolidation.

“It is a holistic approach where we look at computing management, power management and cooling management to reduce the overall energy consumption and carbon footprint at their sites,” says Vaccaro.

Citrix’s Tom Simmons agrees saying that the biggest impact we can have immediately is in reducing power and making the data center greener. “Telework initiatives, the expanded ability to support and deliver IT applications, virtualization and the dynamic data center are all strategies to reduce energy consumption and extend server life,” explains Simmons. “By extending the life of equipment on client side and by maximizing processing power at data center, we can leave a light footprint.”

Not knowing how to be green is something a lot of people struggle with says Autodesk’s Erin Rae Hoffer “The issue is that I don’t always know what the right thing is in terms of trying to be green or energy efficient.” Autodesk has been focusing internally on awareness and has staffed a group to specifically to look at internal processes of how we work. “We are looking to create messages to help our employees understand how to make their own decisions, because in the end, those individual decisions really add up to a huge impact.”

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Rising To The Challenge

When it comes to Green IT, clearly demonstrating savings is a challenge; thus the need for metrics that give us some idea of how to approach these challenges and ROI issues that are sometimes logical in nature but hard to justify.

“From a challenge perspective, you really have to think about green IT from a life cycle perspective,” said EPA CIO Molly O’Neill.

In an existing building, you can make incremental improvements with Green IT products and energy efficiencies according to O’Neill.

“If you have an opportunity to build a new data center, you face making the right purchasing decisions around Energy Star or EPEAT; optimizing and using virtualization technologies. Then you need to think about how you dispose of these things. When we think about it in the life cycle, all of these things together formulate some of the decisions that you make along the way.”

The other challenge is more products are coming out and they are becoming more energy efficient according to O’Neill. That makes Green always a moving target and it becomes even more complicated.

For O’Neill it used to be just about recycling; then it was our desk tops were more efficient and now we have virtualization software to help us in better utilizing our servers and maximizing the energy efficiency on those things; and now you have to think about each individual component in the hardware and how that affects Help Desk and other support..

“This life cycle is really a challenge to look at. They are great challenges because I think they get us where we want, but they make the decision making even more complicated,” added O’Neill.

Americans Are Aware
 

“I recently read a quote that said global warming ranks second among Americans’ concerns. Only terrorism ranks higher,” said EPA CTO Myra Galbreath.

That’s awareness and a big hurdle to cross according to Galbreath. “But the big challenge is to keep that up and make sure we question all along the way the way we use things, the way we are buying them and the way we are disposing of them.”

To Galbreath the network is the computer, everything is connected and we really need to make sure that we are looking at the virtual world embracing technologies that allow people to come to meetings without traveling to get there and the shutting down of  machines if people aren’t using them.

Metrics Needed

“You can only manage what you can measure,” said Catherine Cesnik, Senior Program Manager, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance at Interior. That makes reporting itself one of the challenges she faces; how do you measure energy efficiency.

“One of the metrics we are using is the OMB score cards. We have three score cards for energy, environment and transportation. And electronic use falls to falls to the environment score card.”

Cesnik reported that OMB is working with agencies to determine what metrics should be used to measure these score cards. And she also would like to invite Industry Partners to help find creative solutions to efficiently and effectively measure what is happening. “We need more indicators of how agencies are performing.”

When it comes to ROI, Cesnik explained Green has been proven to be very cost effective over the life cycle. “What is challenging in the federal government is to make sure that the folks that are doing the initial purchasing are speaking to the folks that are doing the operations and maintenance to make sure that the two groups work together to ensure that the groups are looking at the life cycle in a holistic way. And both realize the benefit of the savings of the life cycle,” Cesnik added.

“The DOI was able to show that pilot testing of the EPEAT criteria is cost effective and the DOI’s contract has cost avoided over $16 million so far,” said Cesnik.

The challenge for corporate entities is that they know they have to do something, but there is a lack of clarity. For the individual the same is true – knowing what the right decisions are, translating them into action and then measuring their effects.

Information Modeling
 

Autodesk’s Erin Rae Hoffer says metrics are of particular interest to the IT sector specifically because we assume that building information modeling will become a fundamental part of the design and ultimately facilities management practice.

We can create a lot of data for “field savings” for new projects according to Hoffer, who said that is already producing ROI in the field for construction.

But there is also the opportunity to create data useful for analysis. “You’d have a model of your facility, which is rich with information which you can use hopefully to save while building it,” said Hoffer. “And then use it over the life span of the facility to analyze and understand the decisions you are making.”

Then you would see how certain decisions about locating resources in certain areas, turning things on and off, all the monitoring that people want to do to make those good decisions on a day to day basis are working.

Hoffer says getting that data is a challenge in terms of how you manage that basic low level data. Technology providers and IT professionals need to work on ways to make that data available to individuals at department levels so they can make those good decisions.

“And lastly the standards because Autodesk has worked closely with agencies like the GSA to specify what they want to get from their contractors, so that the data they get will be useful,” added Hoffer.

IT To Green
 

“Sometimes it’s the IT part that is the biggest challenge to get green,” noted Citrix VP Tom Simmons. The applications and the capabilities of IT today are getting hungrier and hungrier requiring faster processing, more memory, more spinning the disk, more capacity on the desk top and in the server.

“I see the challenge from our perspective in industry is how we contain the server sprawl?” asked Simmons. “How do we provide that horse power necessary to run today’s solutions to all of the individuals that need access to it?”

From the Citrix perspective it’s all about the application. “If we can comprehend what the application requirements are, consolidate those and in consolidation you are bringing all of the management and therefore the cost associated with management together, you have the ability to identify the big cost spends and manage those spends,” said Simmons.

Ultimately from a management metrics perspective, it’s comes down to your electric bill and the ability to dynamically re-provision applications. That gives you the ability to do more with less because you’ve got spares that are on line doing something else.

“If we can really make an impact by reducing the cost of power consumption, you get a real and immediate ROI that you can measure,” Simmons explained. “By consolidating the requirements you really can do a lot more requests by lightening the footprint on the user’s side of the equation. You focus most of your management, your application management, your operating system management in the data canter. I can do that with far fewer people than I would need if I had to support a user onsite.” 

Right In Front Of Our Nose     

Unisys’ Ed Vaccaro says there is a lot of Green savings right in front of us, if we want to take advantage of them.

“On the desk top side, one of the things that I think we just overlook very easily is that there are a lot of savings to be gained by just enabling features that already exist in the computers themselves, in the operating systems,” said Vaccaro.

“I know with the ones that I particularly support at Homeland Security, we have very controlled managed desk tops. We focus on applications; we focus on security; we focus on networking. It’s time to start looking at the energy footprint, and we can enable those things with no cost and immediately start getting some returns on those.”

Vaccaro advocates when the computer is not in use to cycle down the power draw on the processor, on the memory, on the disks. Those types of things can happen immediately without even worrying about major investment. “Then as you start to cycle in your normal refresh, you get more and more efficient equipment, get better practices and better behavior,” added Vaccaro.

Next Generation Data Center
 

Unisys has been working internally on what they call the “Next Generation Data Center”.

It’s not just virtualization, it’s creating an ecosystem,” Vaccaro said. “Where you take the next generations of hardware platforms where these capabilities are being built in that have the ability to turn them on and off. The computing ability right on the processor, so you are not drawing power when it’s not being utilized, yet not worrying about the fact that you don’t have enough capacity when there’s consolidated so much on there.”

According to Vaccaro, most data centers are built for peak utilization, which is why the average utilization is only 35 – 40% because “nobody who is a service provider wants to know that their customer is really upset when they are hitting peak loads and they can’t get good response time.”

Then you can integrate the demand curve with things like cooling and electricity. You put tools in place that monitor and provisions all of that stuff so that you can actually see what is going on here said Vaccaro. “Because remember we are selling these circuits so we have to provision them, we have to bill, we have to tell the customer what you are using.”

“It’s really taking the comprehensive approach to it. The most important we have to do though is work with the customers to determine is: what is the most relevant thing we can approach immediately given the applications?

“Then we can do the planning,” said Vaccaro. “That’s not what we are doing today. Planning is the most important thing to make this thing happen on a large scale.”

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At The Top of “The To Do List”

What do you do when everything seems so important that it becomes hard to prioritize what it is you should actually be doing? Well, that’s daily fare for those responsible for federal government Green IT efforts.

So where are government and its Industry Partners putting their emphasis?

For Catherine Cesnik, Senior Program Manager, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance, Department of the Interior the focus is on Energy Star implementation.

“That is one of the requirements of life cycle management. And we are determining what equipment we need to focus on. The goal is 100% target, so it is very aggressive,” says Cesnik.

Cesnik points out that DOI can exempt any equipment that must stay on 24/7 like those that monitor volcano hazards. “Those computers will need to stay up,” she said. “We are not going to shut down airspace, but anyone who is just using a computer for email and word documents to enable energy star on all of those.”

DOI is also starting to look at piloting a Green data center according to Cesnik. “That has been a challenge for us because we don’t build a lot of new buildings, and it is easiest to build a Green data center when you are starting a new building.”

Another key priority for DOI is working on the IT Optimization plan. Electronic Stewardship just came out on the OMB IT optimization plan said Cesnik. “That will help us link into the systemic development of the DOI’s infrastructure over all so that we can really target energy savings and increasing the life span of computers and other types of initiatives associated with electronic stewardship through our IT program.”

GSA Priorities
 

For GSA Assistant Commissioner John Johnson priorities revolve around three activities.

“One is design activities,” said Johnson. “GSA is building smart buildings and smart cooling systems for those GSA buildings along with other IT initiatives that would help conserve energy in the buildings.”

The second focus area is management, specifically systems procurement, RFP development, expense analysis and cost reduction. “We need to make sure that we have project managers that are paying attention to this,” added Johnson. “They need to see green procurement design activities in terms of being forward thinking as to what can be done today and building that into our procurements.”

Number three is education. Johnson said internal organization staff training and employee awareness programs are very important. Johnson says a simple thing like turning off monitors can save us from “wall warts and vampire loads” that consume power even though a device may be turned off.

“Did you know that those converters waste power to the rate of about 30%. If you plug it in it does an A to D conversion, about 30% of that power consumed is wasted, it’s never used,” noted Johnson. “There are a lot of things that we can do in terms of awareness to include turning off monitors in the office space. There are so many opportunities here to improve.”

EPA Priorities
 

For EPA CTO Myra Galbreath a large priority is working with DOE, kicking off a pilot to try to really figure out the energy consumption in a data center and separating out what’s being consumed by people versus equipment.

“It’s not easy to break that out,” said Galbreath. “I kicked off a pilot with DOE to really sit down and look through and try to help data centers on how do you differentiate what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong?” Galbreath explained that at an EPA data center, they found that instead of turning off machines completely and let others run at 100%, it might be more efficient to run all at 40%.

Galbreath also says Energy Star purchasing by users is also at the top of her list. And that user behavior remains an issue although it is improving. “You can get a lot of things in place, but if you don’t get the user used to duplex printing and recycling those printer cartridges, the easy things, it becomes harder.”

EPA CIO Molly O’Neill agrees. “Our Number One priority is the data center and that is a follow up from EPA report to Congress on the energy efficiency in data centers. So we want to make sure that we are doing everything that we can within our own data center as well and help to benchmark EPA,” said O’Neill.  

Although sometimes it seems as if progress is slow, O’Neill points said there has been progress nonetheless.

“I’ve been working in the environmental field for more than 20 years now and in the technology field for more than 10 and it’s amazing how green IT used to just mean, how do I recycle my desk top and to think how far we’ve come,” marveled O’Neill.

O’Neill is also chair of the Federal CIO Council Architecture and Infrastructure committee and co-chair of the Infrastructure LOB committee. “One of my key priorities is to make sure that we put indicators in there and help the other federal agencies in terms of optimizing infrastructure from the green side as well, so I’m representing that side too.”

Unisys Priorities
 

Ed Vaccaro said Unisys is moving ahead pretty aggressively at this point with its Green initiative.

“First, we are working with the customer to help them identify what are the big hits, the quick hits that we can attack right away that will yield the biggest benefits?” said Vaccaro. “When you look at a Green computing strategy particularly as it relates to the large scale things like data centers, it’s a pretty comprehensive program.”

Vaccaro pointed out that when you look at the life cycle that a lot of these agencies and customers are in, they are always in the process of adding new equipment, retiring old stuff. “You can’t just say let’s stop what we are doing right now and go Green,” added Vaccaro.

You have to look at the types of applications you are running and what type of application lends itself to something like virtualization, which is usually the first step according to Vaccaro. “By reducing the footprint of the amount of queues you have you can consolidate that and immediately get some savings by not having as many servers out there.” Then once you achieve that level, you can then look at what’s my refresh schedule then look at newer computers that now can take advantage of the green computing technologies that are being built into these newer and newer servers.

Finally Vaccaro says you start looking at your data center and saying “how do I start linking into things like cooling on demand, power on demand, looking at how do I take the storage and reduce that foot print?”

What Vaccaro is saying is that buying equipment that is more energy efficient you have less collateral issues to deal with, therefore less energy waste. So it’s a long term strategy and you have to keep going and going.

Autodesk Priorities
 

Autodesk’s Erin Rae Hoffer has two main priorities – awareness and concrete offerings.

Hoffer says people want to do the right thing personally – like turning off their lights, computers and outlets -- but they often don’t know what the right thing is in terms of trying to be Green or energy efficient in terms of the agency.

“We’ve been focusing quite a lot internally on awareness and we’ve staffed up a group to specifically to look at our internal processes and how we do our work and to create messages to help our employees understand how to make their own decisions,” said Hoffer.

Autodesk has also sponsored programs on public television to really create a message about energy and create a message about how important it is, and how buildings and infrastructure are an incredibly important focus for that solution.

“On our internal concrete operating side we have focused a lot on what sort of solutions would help designers and facility managers understand how to make those individual good decisions,” said Hoffer. “That includes adding features to products, piloting, working with customers on special initiatives that will help others in the industry understand the best practices.”

Citrix Priorities
 

Tom Simmons of Citrix is putting his priority on the data center.

“The biggest impact that we see for Green IT is as you walk into most data centers today and if you look at the servers, server utilization in the data center is somewhere between 30 and 45%,” noted Simmons.

The result is capacity that most of the time is going under or unutilized. “Through the technologies today around virtualizing applications, virtualizing operating systems and more importantly virtualizing machines, we can dynamically provision those servers today so we can redeploy some of those assets and redeploy them dynamically,” said Simmons.

Simmons explained that if there is a huge load at the end of an operating period for my financial system, servers can be provisioned to do that. “And as the quarter comes, I’ve got now a big requirement for planning and email and I can re-provision those servers,” noted Simmons. “So I need less machines in the data center, therefore I reduce my energy consumption, I reduce my cooling capacity and I provide better service to my IT customers.

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To Protect Human Health and The Environment

“EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment,” said EPA CIO Molly O’Neill.

O’Neill says EPA, like other government agencies and commercial companies is responsible for ensuring that IT investments are socially responsible, environmentally friendly, and fiscally sound. She is very proud of what EPA is doing to further Green IT.

“EPA is a leader in this and we are a proud Gold Award winner for the Federal Electronic Stewardship model, an accredited program addressing the purchasing, use and disposal and recycling of IT equipment,” explained O’Neill.

According to O’Neill, the federal government has donated more than 59,000 desktops and recycled more than 35,000 desktops thus saving about 39,000 megawatts power of energy.  EPA is also embracing, purchasing and using IT equipment that meets the environmental performance criteria outlined by the electronic product environmental assessment tool, EPEAT (Electronic Product Electronic Assessment Tool).

EPEAT was created to meet the growing needs of large instructional purchasers to compare and try products based on environmental performance in addition to cost and performance considerations.

Working closely with O’Neill is EPA’s CTO Myra Galbreath, who is particularly proud of the EPA North Carolina computer center, which was the first to achieve an energy and environmental design award in 2005.

“The building uses solar energy,” said Galbreath. “We have a solar array on the roof; we have solar street lights;, we’ve optimized the controls for lighting and heating and ventilation. 95% of the steel that was used in construction was recycled, that’s my specialty, recycling material during construction.”

John Johnson is GSA’s Assistant Commissioner for IT and he says GSA is comprehensive provider of products and services that span everything from basic office supplies to actually building federal buildings. “We actually have a holistic approach that we are pursuing to look at all of our product lines to make sure that we are pursuing each one of them in terms of what we can do to impact a more sound environment.”

Johnson is looking at over 5,000 GSA contracts to figure out what can be done to influence more favorable conditions with regard to Green IT. “Specifically several of our schedules highlight Energy Star compliant products so we are working to make sure that we continue down that path.”

GSA is also working with EPA who has published Energy Star guidance about servers. “We also require our vendors to identify Energy Star compliant products and services in their commercial offerings,” said Johnson. “So in the scheduled program we are making some headway there, and working with EPA and other agencies I think we can make some tremendous progress.”

Johnson is looking to make a larger Green commitment in their GWACs and network services operations. “When you think about the power supplies that are used for all the IT products and services that we deploy, there’s a lot of room for growth in terms of doing things more efficiently.”

Catherine Cesnik is the Senior Program Manager at the Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance at Interior where she involved in the environmental stewardship mission.

DOI has been active in the electronic stewardship space for over five years said Cesnik. “We started focusing on environmentally responsible disposal and we were one of the agencies that joined EPA to kick off the Federal Electronics Challenge and we also pilot tested the EPEAT criteria on the DOE-wide hardware contract for desk tops, laptops and monitors.”

Electronic stewardship is a very interdisciplinary initiative and it takes the skills of the environmental folks, the IT folks, and the property management acquisition folks said Cesnik.

Industry Views

“Traditionally Citrix has played a role in keeping cars off the road, limiting the amount of office space that government would need and helping with teleworking issues,” explained VP Tom Simmons. “But over the last two years we’ve really expanded our ability to support green IT initiatives with virtualization technology.”

Citrix is in the applications delivery business, relying on the dynamic data center where applications are being consolidated. This supports Green initiatives.

“We have solutions that can help increase the usability and availability of servers thereby reducing the energy requirements, extending the life cycle of the servers and the storage that is there,” said Simmons.

Simmons also said with the ability to virtualize applications, instead of dropping some of those old computers off, “we can extend the life of computers on the client’s side by maximizing the processing capacity in the data center and using a very light foot print on the user side.”

At Unisys, Ed Vaccaro talks about his company being a consumer, a provider, and a consultant all at the same time.

As a consumer, a large company, we have a lot of equipment, and we have several large data centers and have recently gone through a major revamp of our key data center where we reduced our carbon footprint by about 67% through a major green initiative said Vaccaro.

Unisys uses that same data center for outsourcing services to a number of clients who use their service offerings. “We are using that those experiences and technologies we’ve developed and offering those experiences to our clients,” said Vacarro.

“Right now we are working with several large customers to help them as they work through technology refreshes to come up with green approaches through virtualization, through consolidation, and a real holistic approach,” said Vacarro.

 The goal is to look at the entire computing management, power management, heating management, cooling management approach to reducing the overall energy consumption and carbon footprint that the computing resources use today.

Autodesk is a company you may not think of as being involved in Green. Not true says Erin Rae Hoffer, Industry Program Manager at Autodesk.

Autodesk is a high-tech software company with a broad range focus on design from industrial to special effects said Hoffer. They focus on products across the building life cycle.

“That includes design through facilities management and through the civil infrastructures so that’s a pretty wide range of targets, because for Autodesk, sustainability is a very important corporate focus,” said Hoffer.  

Autodesk particularly looks at the building environment, because the building is responsible for consuming a huge percentage of energy. It uses high tech building information modeling design tools to help architects design Green buildings.

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