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IT Vs. the Permanent Energy Crisis
snydeq writes "Organizations looking to remain profitable in the face of escalating energy costs may lean even harder on IT to achieve energy efficiencies in the years to come, InfoWorld reports. But instead of limiting IT's efficiency role to the datacenter, companies will tap IT's vast knowledge of company networks, equipment, and work processes to uncover efficiencies across the organization, in some cases tipping facilities management into IT. 'There is a lot IT can do to fix its own 2 percent [of the company's carbon emissions] and make it more efficient, but the big opportunity for IT is to take a leadership role in tackling that other 98 percent across the business,' says one analyst. And by taking charge of the organization's energy strategy now, IT will be in prime position to alter its relationship with management and reap benefits in the boardroom in the years ahead, analysts contend."
"IT will be in prime position to alter its relationship with management and reap benefits in the boardroom in the years ahead, analysts contend."
Ahh, more responsibility, additional liability, same pay scale.
Better known as 318230.
Using conservation to reduce carbon emissions assumes a carbon based power source. Why not take all the brain power you are going to throw at conservation and throw it into developing wind, solar, and nuclear as power sources?
Quite seriously - run some optical tube skylights (like this, they come in a wide variety of options) into your working areas. FAR too many companies are wasting energy powering internal lighting when the sun's out. You can always turn on the lights *if* you need them due to a storm.
As an added bonus, you'll start to eliminate health problems - daytime-constant lighting has been proven to mess with your internal cycles and messes up peoples' sleeping patterns, a large part of why sleep disorders are so prevalent in developed countries.
The solution is obvious, simply outsource all the work and fire the IT employees. This will give you massive savings, make the few domestic employees more reliable, and give you super management powers that will make you invincible.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Used to keep the populace in line and fearful. We've always been at war with EastAsia.
If you want to see a real energy crisis (not the one that western environmentalists have manufactured as part of their plan to be able to tell everyone else how to live while feeling morally superior) visit someplace like Albania, where the power is on for limited periods during the day, even in Tirana, and randomly intermittent throughout the rest of the country. Or someplace in Africa, where electric lights are a far-off dream for most.
The "energy crisis" is FUD stirred up by the very people who won't allow us to build nuclear power plants, who shut down wind power sites because of danger to spotted owls, and who seem to believe that 6 billion people should return to an agrarian lifestyle characterized by hard physical labor, malnourishment, and a short lifespan. All while they, the appointed guardians of the new order, are the only ones allowed to drive their SUVs around "public" parks like Yosemite.
Well, until recently I ran the IT department for a manufacturer and I'd say bad, bad idea. The company is currently in the process of building a new facility with in a combined office/factory building. I must say, sure, the computers and computer cooling equipment might take upwards of 15% of the electricity of the new building, but cranes, welders, plasma tables, galvinization equipment, etc. that is required for us to build our product isn't just going to magically take less electricity just because we want it to. IT can take less electricity today due to increases in computing power, efficiency, etc. These have been demand driven because of the operating costs, but when you buy a welding machine you look at its functionality, not its electricity cost. Unless the cost of electricity climbs beyond $50,000 a month for a small shop such as ours you won't be seeing any demand for more efficient tools. Demand is what gave us more efficient IT equipment, and it will be the same for other equipment. When that happens the various departments such as welding, fabrication, etc. will still be designing their new work spaces, just with a mandate to purchase efficient equipment whenever possible. The IT department won't be planning many factories any time soon.
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Surely the largest energy gains would come from telecommuting.
I submit that the shift to telecommuting will look less like the current employee group working out of their home, and more like companies increasing relying on "outsourcing", and out-sorcerers increasingly consisting of people who work in low-marginal-energy environments - whether their own college dorm, some un-cooled sweatshop in Thailand.
It bears mentioning that working from home reduces the AC energy for life-work by 50% while reducing the transportation energy by 80%. It also reduced healthcare costs by reducing viral exposures.
Articles like that are for upper management types who do not want to read technical details. It does seem that more and more roles are merging together, facilities management included. Look at asset management. The tools we use are starting to provide centralized asset management for not just IT, but finance and facilities too. Granted they don't require the monitoring and config management capabilities of an IT geared product, but then they don't have to have rights into those modules either. With building systems tying into the network it's a fact of life that IT will become more involved.
Yes, that's like 12 kWh per week! Why, at 10c/kWh, that would be almost $5 per month.
And most cheap ass computers come with power supplies at 300W peak, but the average draw is closer to 100W. For an average small LCD panel it's around 50-100W. So you're looking at 150-200W of draw, not 300W. That's if they're not using a laptop, which would be probably around 20W.
But that's beside the point, because even if your employees are working from home, you still need to be running your servers. Having remote workers does save on travel time and gas usage though.
>You know, it is in fact possible to survive in most parts of the world without air conditioning.
Yes, of course, but if you want me to exchange my time in order for you to take advantage of my skilled labor, I shall do much more than merely "survive."
This is not negotiable.
I can "subsist" without making myself part of your corporate enterprise, get it?
If I work for you, I'm doing it for the rewards, and I have no shame in asking for the money.
On the other hand, when I've worked in IT I haven't had the problems that are so often reported by people who seem to do nothing but suffer.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The only IT issue here, is how to roll out patches/updates - but any IT manager with a grain of talent can sort that out.
You say that as if IT managers with a grain of talent are commonplace.
I think it comes down to stop wasting time and money on the conservation of energy and start making more of it, lots more of it. Nuclear power is the only currently viable method that does not significantly contribute to global warming etc etc etc. If we start making lots of electricity and make it cheap everything else will come to use it. Oil was cheap for a long time that's why we used it for energy. Show me 1 cent a kwh electricity and you can bet everybody with switch.
No sir I dont like it.
If they still refuse, just walk around and turn OFF all the CRTs left burning all night with screen savers. I used to do this in the NOC, turned off 10-20 CRTs as I left for the night that were doing nothing but heating and lighting the room...
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Just exactly is information technology energy inefficient?
Is it through the use of thousands of PCs in a large corporation each using 400+ watts of power (PC and CRT combined)? Switch to laptops and large screen LCD monitors.
Is it because the output of the IT department isn't doing enough to reduce the overall company energy bill? Well, yes, the purpose of the IT department is to look for ways to reduce bottlenecks in the production process. Which means that it looks for ways to speed up production, which means using more energy.
Maybe they're trying to say that the IT department is using too much energy driving to work and they should just all stay home and work in their pajamas from their kitchen tables. Hell, maybe the IT department simply drinks too much coffee.
Sure they can order the IT department to tweak and focus and get their energy consumption down. After a whole year, the IT department just might save enough energy to match one trip in the corporate jet carrying a couple executives across the continent for the purpose of getting drunk with another couple of executives from another company. Nothing like real 'face time' when you need to close the big deal.
Let's face it. Everything that American management says is basically full of shit. Sometimes they actually know it and must say it anyway. Usually they don't. For that matter, much management statements from any country are BS. But the Americans are the world-masters at total corporate double-think and nonsense.
Dilbertize them and ignore them. In twenty years the smart managers will be still around and the vast majority of dumb ones will be most likely be dead. Simply because they don't know what to do to keep themselves alive and no one's going to go out of their way to see that they survive. You should survive, though. And don't be concerned about being green.
You can't be lean, mean, serene, and green all at the same time.
Actually, if I understand the summary right, it says more like: well, we IT guys will teach the rest of the company too to be greener and more efficient and do more with less! And they'll listen to us! 'Cause we're smart and high-tech like that! And we have computers too!
Which, honestly, sounds to me like someone's wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur.
1. If IT is only 2% of a company's expenses, then they probably have some other stuff there which involves physics or chemistry. Like, you know, melting some steel, putting some serious amps through molten bauxite, or some tanks where all sorts of chemistry happens at high pressures and temperatures.
1.A. A lot of that is _hard_ to make more energy efficient. You can't, for example just cover a steel plant in thick thermal insulation, because then the air inside would reach a thousand degrees withing seconds. Or you can't melt steel with half the energy, because honestly there are some physical constants of the universe you'd need to change. Not saying it's impossible to come up with something better, but it isn't trivial stuff either. Partially because...
1.B. They do that already. Don't imagine that there isn't already a strong economic incentive to reduce your costs. In fact, it's the #1 thing you can promise, to get Wall Street to like you more. There are some smart engineers out there working on just that kind of stuff already.
1.C. Let's not kid ourselves, we may be smart guys and gals, but nobody knows _everything_. The idea that some guy sitting at the computer all day would also know enough to optimize an assembly line or cracking tower, just like that, if only someone would listen to him, are close to nil. It's a different domain. Chances are you, or your IT coleagues don't even know what that assembly line is like and how it works. You'd need to put years into just understanding that, and the science behind it, and, frankly, there are people more qualified than you there. We still _do_ produce other flavours of engineers, you know?
2. Well, I can't see many upper-level managers changing their processes just because the IT guy said so. Even _if_ the IT guy happens to be right. In a lot of places they're so caught up in their power games, and showing who's more important than who, that... well, to say the least, what makes you think they'd just give _you_ some of their power? Or better yet, give you power over them? Heh. Dream on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here in Japan (which is only an Asian country when it wants to be and, most of the time, it doesn't), they teach kids to do mathematics by visualizing a calculator. Its only in Asian-all-the-time-countries like Thailand where you're too poor to afford a good imaginary calculator that you need to revert to the old imaginary abacus.
And if you think Japan is advanced, I hear eight year olds in the US are starting to do imaginary Google searches on their imaginary Wikipedia... creating the fastest lookup of worthless trivia about Matter-Eater Lad ever seen in the history of the human race. [needs citation: OK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad , there, are you happy?]
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.