Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PROGRESSION
OF OUR
NATION
TOWARDS
‘GO GREEN’
BY
ANITHA BHOOPAL
JENKIN J.S.
Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................................................................4
2. GLOBAL TRENDS..........................................................................................................................................................4
2.1. THE INDIAN CONSUMERS....................................................................................................................................5
2.2. THE CHALLENGES FOR INDIA’S GREEN BRANDS..........................................................................................6
2.3. SUPPORTING THE GREEN MANDATE................................................................................................................6
2.4. DRIVING GREEN INNOVATION...........................................................................................................................6
3. GREEN STRATEGY........................................................................................................................................................7
4. GREEN COMPUTING.....................................................................................................................................................8
4.1. GREEN STEPS TO BE FOLLOWED........................................................................................................................8
5. GREEN ARCHITECTURE...............................................................................................................................................9
5.1. ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING.....................................................................................................................10
5.2. DEPLOY IN (THE RIGHT) TIME..........................................................................................................................10
5.3. GRID COMPUTING................................................................................................................................................10
5.4. INCREASING EFFICIENCY..................................................................................................................................11
5.5. VIRTUALIZATION.................................................................................................................................................11
6. CONCLUSION...............................................................................................................................................................12
REFERENCES.................................................................................................................................................................... 13
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1. INTRODUCTION
Going green is not only an environmental prerogative but also an economic imperative. Green is slowly and
steadily becoming the symbolic color of eco-consciousness in India. Although India is one of the lowest-
intensity producers of CO2 among major countries, its CO2 emissions increased 57 percent between 1992 and
2002. In this paper we have focused on going green in IT and IT enabled services. In the modern IT
infrastructure, computing and communication system plays a key role having impact on the every aspect of life
including services related to health, banking, commerce, defense, education and entertainment, especially in
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developing countries like India and China. Since the IT contributes to around 5% of GDP in India, it is more
important for the nation and its development towards becoming an eco-friendly nation by reducing its carbon
wastes. The increased use of IT has lead the nation to deal with the green related issues like energy
consumption, heat dissemination, greenhouse emission and resource total cost of ownership. Faced with
economic downturn the IT companies have also identified “going green” as a cost-saving measure and are now
pursuing these low-risk initiatives as they often provide quick returns. While an estimated 3.3 lakh tones of e-
waste is generated in India, about 50,000 tones is imported or dumped in the country. Only 40 per cent of India's
total e-waste is recycled, and the rest is left in storehouses due to an inefficient collection system. Green
computing with the aim of reducing energy costs and co2 emissions and environment protecting, has become a
potential research focus for all the information and communication technology designers. This concept is to
make computers from beginning to end a green product. It is the time for developing nations like India to follow
at least some rules of thumb as an initiation to achieve partly the benefit of “green computing”. Since IT has
been growing at an incredible level in India, it is the fact that the electricity consumption by the sector has direct
impact on the environment. So the strategy and the operation plan towards going green computing should be
devised by the organizations and should also be supported by the government. This would help the nation to
make a progress towards going green and sustainable development in becoming a superpower.
2. GLOBAL TRENDS
The green movement has been expanding rapidly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Consumers in
those countries are taking responsibility and doing the right thing. Consumer awareness and motivation continue
to drive change in the marketplace—notably through the introduction of more energy-saving and eco-friendly
products. Next year, consumers around the world will spend about US$500 billion, double the current level, on
green products and services. And approximately three-fourths of the population in the U.S. and U.K. expect to
maintain or increase their level of spending on green products in the coming year
initiative in Mumbai. ICICI asks its customers to sign up for paperless bank statements, and the bank plants a
tree for each complying customer.
Of late, Indian IT companies have adopted technologies and practices including green buildings; green
computing infrastructure e.g. energy-efficient data centers; power-efficient computers; sharing infrastructure
e.g. shared data centers; addressing issues like e-waste management, etc. They are also deploying IT solutions
which help them become green including cloud computing, video-conferencing, intelligent transport systems,
Web conferencing, motion and heat detection sensors, amongst others. Here are a few examples of other green
initiatives in India:
The International Indian Film Academy hosts international events as a way of championing a green
response to global warming.
India's largest tire company, MRF, has recently launched a new tubeless, eco-friendly rubber tire that
reduces rolling resistance and results in lower fuel consumption.
Bajaj Auto has installed wind power generation units in three factories that not only conserve energy but
also save Rs 25 crore in power costs each year. (Rs 25 crore is approximately $5.9 million USD or €3.7
million.)
The Orchid Ecotel Hotel—Asia's first eco-friendly five-star hotel chain, is conserving natural resources
without compromising quality of service.
3. GREEN STRATEGY
Setting a clear vision and strategy ultimately enables people to make better decisions that align with the
enterprise priorities to provide goods and services in the global marketplace. Green strategy affects decisions
that are made across the entire enterprise, including business strategy, operating strategy, organization strategy,
information strategy, applications strategy, technology strategy, and supporting infrastructure. Though green
technology has become a buzz word most of the organizations are not discussing these terms in any of its stake
holders meeting or in the companies newsletter. Adopting an enterprise-level “green strategy” is important for
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all the organizations and already many organizations are headed in that direction. A green strategy helps to take
decision that has positive impact on the environment. A green strategy has the following three principles:
Fosters a common culture of awareness and action.
Facilitates decisions and transformation initiatives that improve the environment.
Have attractive value propositions that are cost effective.
Creating a green culture often involves reinforcing behavior that people already want to adopt, but there is still a
need for the appropriate tools and training in order to change.
“Green IT” involves providing eco-friendly infrastructure, placing emphasis on energy efficiency in computing
and selecting products from vendors that have environmentally friendly sourcing, manufacturing, delivering and
disposal operations. So enterprise-level green strategy when properly applied has the potential to impact nearly
every area of a company’s operations and can significantly impact both top line revenue growth and bottom line
cost savings. The following figure shows how different level of strategy formulation (Strategy Pyramid) and the
different areas of operations they govern are influenced by green strategy.
Now we shall see the ways in which the goals of the green strategy can be achieved.
4. GREEN COMPUTING
Green computing is the study and practice of efficient and eco-friendly computing resources. In recent years,
companies in the computer industry have come to realize that going green inspired business model is the best
for their interest. It includes the implementation of energy-efficient central processing units (CPU’s), servers
and peripherals as well as reduced resource consumption and proper disposal of electronic waste. Recently, the
triple bottom line (abbreviated as "TBL" or "3BL" and also known as "people, planet, profit") is becoming a
new measure for business performance. These three pillars capture an expanded spectrum of values and criteria
for measurement of organizational (and societal) success mainly the economical, ecological and social status of
the organization. This triple bottom line concept is important when it comes to anything green and the same
goes for green computing. This means manufacturers create computers in such a way that reflects the triple
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bottom line positively by which green strategy is implemented. This can be achieved by following “green”
design architecture, energy saving usage techniques and recycle and reuse of products.
5. GREEN ARCHITECTURE
The architecture of the system should sustain to the goal of energy saving within the Enterprise architecture
Domain, along with the traditional business goals of IT. Beyond the product procurement policy, environment
systemic quality metrics need to be built into at every part of the IT architectural process and at all levels of
products. The architecture principles must coincide with the organization’s core principles to ensure that the
work done by the development team ensures the achievement of organization’s larger goals.
The main factor that should be considered by the development team is the effective and efficient use of
resources. Some servers run only single applications to avoid conflict with other applications and there are
computers which will be under utilized. The applications may run on multi processor but make effectively make
use of only a single processor. Some servers will perform only for a certain part of the day. As a result hardware
is not utilized completely. Most large organizations today have this problem consuming valuable resources and
producing emission from the energy that they consume. Design goals must also consider other systemic quality
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metrics like name services, back up and recovery, management systems and network infrastructure. A
sustainable data centre must:
Encourage IT reuse
Reduce IT complexity
Align stakeholders
Optimize functional and non-functional systemic quality goals
Spend the organizations money wisely
A typical data center consumes energy in four basic areas:
Critical computational systems (servers, networks, storage)
Cooling systems
Power conversion such as power distribution units (PDU)
Hoteling (everything else: lighting, and so on).
The following features can be implemented in the architecture to improve the efficiency and save energy.
Going one step further companies have planned to reuse the heat energy produced in the grid. This energy will
be directly used as a heating element in the home for a warmer temperature.
5.5. VIRTUALIZATION
Virtualization and server consolidation allows user to “do more with less”, by replacing several small computers
with one large server. But as per a recent green IT survey, many enterprises do not associate virtualization with
green computing. Indian industry is still absorbing the concept of virtualization and unified computing which
are technologies with tremendous potential to help organizations go green in terms of energy
efficiency. Virtualization can be achieved with cloud computing. Cloud computing is a shared approach to
computer resources, where software, storage, and information are provided to computers and other devices
(such as smart phones) over the Internet that has the potential to help businesses reduce their carbon emissions.
The environmental benefits of moving to the Cloud are recently commissioned by Microsoft, Accenture and
WSP Environment & Energy. The cloud computing can cut the carbon footprint of business of any size. Studies
were conducted by various firms in this regard and results showed that the biggest energy savings and carbon
footprint reductions occurred in small businesses that switched to cloud computing for business programs. The
analysis showed that small businesses could cut energy use and emissions by 90 percent by using shared cloud
services. Medium sized businesses saw reductions of between 60 and 90 percent in energy and emissions. Big
businesses also saved energy and reduced emissions by a still impressive 30 to 60 percent.
Four key factors enabled cloud computing to reduce energy and emissions:
Dynamic Provisioning: Reducing wasted computing resources through better matching of server
capacity with actual demand.
Multi-Tenancy: Flattening relative peak loads by serving large numbers of organizations and users on
shared infrastructure.
Server Utilization: Operating servers at higher utilization rates.
Data Centre Efficiency: Utilizing advanced data centre infrastructure designs that reduce power loss
through improved cooling, power conditioning, etc.
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Cleaner, greener, cheaper are the words that describe the benefits to businesses of using cloud computing.
When you reduce energy, you also reduce costs. By essentially outsourcing the server portion of their
operations, businesses save also on maintenance costs. All of which is better for the bottom line and investor
and consumer relations.
6. CONCLUSION
Apple fell down naturally but only Newton asked ‘Why?’ and that has lead to wonders in physics. Now human
race is already aware of ‘Why climate change occurs?’, ‘What is climate change?’ and ‘Who is causing it?’
Now it’s our turn to think how to reverse its effects and prevent further deterioration to our planet. As we
mentioned earlier, our future is going to be driven by computers and software applications, but corporate India
is yet to implement it in a large scale.
“Preventing and preparing is better than repenting and repairing”.
Some Indian companies like Wipro have started the initiatives by introducing N-computing energy saving
models. There is a need for Corporate India to be aware of global developments and take steps to implement the
same, as per each company’s requirements and government regulations. In future, ‘green IT’ practices offer
varied opportunities to create value within the organization. There will also be a new role ‘sustainable green IT
managers’ who will be responsible for creating and managing green IT programs.
REFERENCES
www.greenpeace.org
http://www.greentechnolog.com/country/india/
Data Center Metrics- Management of International Quality- An International Journal Volume 20, 2009.
http://www.greenm3.com – Article on Green IT Architecture, written by a Microsoft CTO and Field Architect.
http://www.wipro.in/products/greenpc/
www.ibm.com/uk/services
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_computing
http://www.expresscomputeronline.com