AT THE END OF IT are factors like cutting costs and saving on power. Of course, such an idea would be more relevant to data centers, where businesses try to bring down power consumption for non-critical areas and reduce carbon footprints in the face of escalating electricity charges and low availability of power. All the same, it's a good idea overall.
While the trend shows that vendors across product lines are going in for more eco-friendly products, it has had a cascading effect on partners as well as solutions providers who help customers to reduce power and ownership cost.
The concept of Green is associated with all the products across systems, components, storage, servers, networking products, software and so on. There is an effort from vendors and partners to drive more technologies to check the wastage and get greener across the data centers, be they large enterprises or mid and small ones.
Concerted efforts are on to drive optimum utilization of resources; derive energy saving mechanism through technologies such as virtualization, thin client computing, judicious power distribution and designing methods. An insight into IDC's finding says that energy and cooling expenses will grow eight times faster than purchasing costs of new servers through 2010.
According to Gartner, there has been a significant increase in storage demand in the country growing from one petabyte in 2001 to more than 34 petabytes by 2007, resulting in the increasing data center uptake of storage.
Gartner also predicts that the total data center capacity in the country will reach 5.1 million square feet by 2012 which will drive increasing domestic requirement from sectors such as financial institutions, telecom operators, manufacturing and services.
Most vendors agree that companies are investing in additional data centers to enhance or meet disaster recovery and business continuity requirements. Vendors and partners are putting their best foot forward in driving Green IT for better future.
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Green game for bottom-line growth Channel case study: Frontier Business Machines
 Ravi Verdes "We have formed a Strategic Business Unit with a dedicated team to look at green IT initiatives in the market by offering consultancy, assessments, design, implementation, and support of Green IT infrastructure," informs Verdes. Frontier runs media campaigns, conducts customer seminars and holds interactions on the Green IT regularly. As part of this strategy, it internally implemented ERP and business applications in virtualized environment in its data center. It also set up a virtual infrastructure lab, which can act as a proof of concept center for its customers. This initiative called for a reward from its vendor as best Green IT solutions partner amidst peer groups. On account of such efforts, VMware honored Frontier Business Systems as its Best Green IT Solutions Partner for 2008 recently. Greener pastures Verdes says that Green IT, in the short run, does not show great profitability for partners. The challenges in the way include slow adoption ratio, high initial investment to develop skills, too many players creating confusion with different messages. But the long-term rewards are undeniable. "We make money through consulting, services and selling the Green IT solutions. In the long run the adoption of green computing will become a standard leading to profitability," Verdes details. Virtualization, the pillar for Green IT "I believe that virtualization is a critical part of our Green IT strategy, which ensures cleaner environment and gain substantial cost and operational benefits," says Verdes who has now readied its teams on the virtualization technologies. Going forward, the company plans to align with IBM for its Green Data Center initiative, which requires a high level of proficiency and skill sets. Verdes has equipped his team with expertise needed to provide onsite support services for virtualization software related to reduced power consumption, heat dissipation, and savings in time, space, manpower, and materials shipped for the customers. For Frontier, data centers are likely to contribute at least 15 per cent to its revenues, about 15 per cent to the overall growth with profitability. Going forward, Verdes expects, the green IT initiative will contribute substantially to Frontier's revenues.Last year, the company's revenue was Rs 200 crore. |
Vendors want Green
The critical point here is that the vendors, besides realizing their social responsibility of evolving their own 'green' products, are also inclined towards involving their partners to drive the same to the customers' end in all their effort in promoting the green concept.
While EMC believes that the virtualization, de-deuplication, consolidation and ILM product lines does drive green IT, its effort has been to involve partners to a large extent. According to Praveen Sahai, EMC's head-marketing & corporate affairs finds the EMC Velocity Partner Program to be focused on partners involving them into training and education, mentoring, incentive program, and business review, irrespective of what solutions they sell to the customers. Sahai and his team provide channel partners with a training roadmap to skill the channel workforce and develop knowledge and expertise on green technology, besides providing solution specific training roadmap to channel partners.
Rajesh Dhar, Country Manager, Industry Standard Servers, Hewlett Packard India Sales, talks of four critical components in ensuring green all around which includes virtualization, data center management, recycling and an effective green IT strategy.
HP has reduced the number of applications in its offices from 5,000 to 1,500 and the number of data centers from 85 to six, he informs. "Our green storage technology can cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centers by 50 per cent. Our products dynamic smart cooling technology is expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 7,500 tons annually and integrity RX2660 servers can drive energy efficiency."
According to Karthik Ramarao, Director - Technology, Systems Practice, Sun Microsystems India, it was necessary to build an in-house data center to showcase the advantages that a green IT would bring in. Hence as a testimony, Sun's new data center in Bangalore has already saved the planet nearly 4,100 tons of carbon dioxide per year and trimmed one per cent from Sun's total carbon footprint.
From a partner's perspective, Ramarao finds an opportunity to drive green IT in the small and mid-markets where customers are setting up data centers and need optimum utilization of existing infrastructure.
Virtualization vendor VMware has formed a global consortium with various organizations to drive Green IT eco-systems. "We have rolled out Green Grid Initiative which keeps track of savings across the components including power, carbon emissions, cooling, reduced space and increase in overall operational efficiency," informs Ganesh Mahabala, country head, VMware.
While driving this consciously through OEMs and channel partners using the servers, storage and desktop virtualization products, Mahabala expects the power saving to be in the tune of 7000 KW per server and reduce 4 tons of carbon emissions from the machines, which amounts to 30 per cent saving.
VMware is encouraging partners to drive its VDI solutions which can ensures 70 per cent reduction in power for each desktop. Mahabala finds that partners are making money in doing the capacity planning, SLAs and server utilization service revenues, besides product sales.
Quantum' director for marketing for Apac, Jim Simon finds that multi-tiered storage architecture with right mix of disk, tape, and enabling technologies like data de-duplication could be the appropriate solution to address key concerns around data center power, cooling, and space requirements in addition to increasing costs are and supply is becoming increasingly scarce.
He feels that a multi-tiered architecture will help attain operational efficiencies and reduce power consumption.
Rajesh Khurana, Seagate's Country Manager for India & Saarc says, "We ensure that production efficiencies that minimize energy use, including equipment design optimization, facility retrofitting, and energy-wise process improvements are met with. These initiatives result in reduced electricity used per drive (by 17% in FY2007), and continue to show reductions today."
Cisco identifies opportunities of greenhouse gas offset, and green energy purchase, deploys alternative energy sources where feasible, and educates employees and partners.
According to R Dhamodaran, Senor Vice President, Channel Operations and Commercial Strategy, India & Saarc, Cisco drives this through partnership with communities such as Carbon-to-Collaboration initiative, and by working with customers, employees, partners, governments, and influencers.
Cisco believes that partners will play a key role in the transformation of the data centers, or Data Center 3.0.
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Cutting carbon emissions Yugal Sharma, Regional Director - India & South Asia, Polycom has been instrumental in driving growth for video-conferencing solutions in the country. Polycom claims to have recorded a 40 per cent year on year growth in India. Sharma maintains that the entire revenue is based on the principle of protecting the environment. In an interview with ECB, he illustrates how 'Green' is an important aspect for every technology vendor and how such a strategy can bear fruit
There has been a significant awareness about global warming and the greenhouse gas effects, worldwide. More and more companies are going for 'clean' and 'green' technology due to pressures of politicians, shareholders, and an inner sense of corporate citizen responsibility to reduce levels of carbon dioxide. Polycom helps the companies reduce their carbon footprint, while simultaneously cutting operating costs and delivering a quick business ROI. With the rise in demand for green technologies and 'Green' policies coming into vogue, 'unified communications' is becoming popular as it facilitates virtual meetings between colleagues across geographies, cutting business travel, and helping to save the environment from emission of greenhouse gases. What are the other benefits of your technology? Polycom meets the growing need of businesses and governments, in reducing carbon footprints. We specialize in video conferencing technologies. Using telepresence instead of flying to Mumbai once a month for a one-hour meeting, a Delhi-based executive can save approximately 240 hours of travel time, 3.1 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and $10,000 per year. This also means taking a car off the road for six months approximately. More than 44 per cent of Polycom's employees globally use video-conferencing to cut down air travel. This has helped about 12 per cent of our workforce to scrap more than six air trips per month and helped about 45 per cent of us to cut down more than six car trips per month. We have made an internal commitment to reduce our travel costs by 25 per cent in a year. Our technology makes it easier for companies to develop their business in different locations and cut on business travel. Any estimate on the size of the market for Green IT? The demand for a greener IT is set to boom. According to a Gartner report, 'Green IT: The New Industry Shockwave', we can expect a flurry of climate change legislations during the next two years. Cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of 25 per cent by 2020 and 60 to 80 per cent by 2050 are likely targets. How do you engage with partners in your green IT initiatives? We engage partners for all products and solutions. We train them to show business ROI to their customers through a Partner Resource Center. We have recently come up with our initiative called Go Green Initiative Service Program for partners. This provides a comprehensive assessment of meeting and travel requirements, collaborative tool usage, and identifies where collaborative technologies could be and should be applied. This assessment provides a direction to the customer's management teams. Some assessment techniques and features that channels can use are: i. Quality-of-Service: Assessment of current service quality, determination of appropriate service quality expectations, and identification of best practices that drive increases in quality. ii. Business Benefits: Information of strategic and tactical value that a going green collaborative conferencing initiative brings to the organization iii. Processes, Procedures, Promotions and Training: Evaluation of these aspects as they relate to the adoption and usage of video conferencing. Recommendations are made regarding how each of these areas works best to improve overall usage of collaborative technologies. iv. Video-Miles: This is a software that comes along with Polycom solutions that automatically and accurately monitors carbon emissions reduced and cost saved. It also provides utilization drivers for VC systems in an organization. It provides automatic and accurate data instantly on all environmental, financial, technical, performance utilization-level for all users of VC infrastructure. What challenges do partners face? Organizations in India don't yet buy the technology only because it is Green. Government policies and incentives for organizations to promote Green IT within, is yet to influence the Indian economy. Business case and ROI are the primary factors (must have) and then comes the importance of green. This is what partners need to understand to successfully sell green technologies. However, the customer perception on Audio-Video Conferencing has shifted to a more positive mindset with Polycom easy-to-use technology and high ROI solutions. We are witnessing much greater awareness amongst organizations across verticals using videoconferencing as a business productivity tool. |
Partnering with Green
Some channel partners have indeed made green IT their forte. It is not confined to the top systems integrators but has reached the tier-2 partners. These partners, besides adopting technologies such as virtualization, duplication, consolidation, and thin client computing, are working out ways to reduce power costs and carbon footprints for customers.
Hyderabad-based Choice Solutions, a partner of APC, Cisco, HP Microsoft, and VMware has developed a matrix to assess data center infrastructure efficiency, using the standards from LEED certification and Green Building Council.
Jagannath calls this strategy VCOG, i.e. virtualization, consolidation, optimization to green IT. "About 70 per cent of my customers are using our Green IT solutions. Green IT contributes close to 20 per cent to our total revenues," he informs.
Choice's CIO Ravi Channavajhola feels that while the challenges for partners are plenty, one needs to be vendor-neutral and create a brand for oneself in this space.
Choice has invested in a dedicated 30-people team to address Green IT initiatives. About 25 per cent of the investment goes into developing new business strategies. There have been instances, where Jagannath and his team drove drastic reduction in power, cooling, overall cost of hardware by consolidating 27 servers to bring down to 12 and saving effectively.
Jiten Mehta, Director, Magnamious Systems, a solution provider in Mumbai says, "The concept of Green IT has gained prominence now owing to reduced hardware deployment enabled by various new technologies."
Magnamious specializes in thin client computing and virtualization. It has carried out about 20 installations involving server consolidation that gave the customers saving on power, energy and hardware. "Our customers saw a 40 per cent saving on power through the migration from physical to virtual severs and about 70 per cent saving using blades," Mehta informs.
"The major gift of Green IT to us has been revenues through services. For every deal of Rs 1.5 lakh, about Rs 50,000 comprise of pure service revenues. Green IT also opens up possibilities of new managed services contracts like facilities management and information protection and back-up," Mehta concludes.