Sustainability is a broad term that covers many things. It is difficult to tackle the whole system at the enterprise level, so I’ll use a divide-and-conquer approach and focus on IT first. After all, I have been working on green IT. IT can make a big contribution to sustainability in two distinct ways. The first is to become more energy efficient and sustainable itself. The second is to use it to make other things more energy efficient and sustainable.
Regardless, IT sustainability requires a basic activity: measurement. In order to gauge something’s status and its improvement, we first need to measure its attributes and set metrics. With the measured data and derived metrics, we can make improvements and verify their effects. For example, data center attributes include power consumption, GHG emissions, water usage, and e-waste. I’ve said before that measuring is one thing that anyone can do to start improving data center energy efficiency. I am now extending this idea to measure what appear to be important factors for sustainability.
In previous blogs, I’ve written about a few companies that provide a technology to measure power consumption, temperature, and humidity in data centers. Most of them install their own sensors at servers and other equipment, collect and aggregate the measured data, and display the processed data in a dashboard-like display. Power consumption, GHG emissions (converted from power consumption), temperature, and humidity are straightforward attributes. Data availability depends on the installation of sensors and related infrastructures. The most recent EPA Energy Star effort for data centers assumes that power consumption will be measured at UPSs, as it is at the majority of data centers in the U.S. now. Therefore, the sensor and its related measuring infrastructure are more advanced technologies than most.
How do you measure water consumption and e-waste processing? If there is a sensor or meter attached to the water sources and discharge places, this information may be collected automatically. If there is no such infrastructure, do you enter the usage information by hand? This is a new area and I am not familiar with it. E-waste is much more difficult. There is no automated way of tracking e-waste processing. The information regarding the processing of e-waste needs to be handled and entered into the system by hand.
Another question I have is how the companies that do not collect their own data but process the data collected and aggregated by other tools enter those data into their system. For example, OSIsoft takes care of more than 400 protocol and data formats for further processing. So many kinds are necessary mainly because each company has its own protocol and data types. How does CSRware actually enter power consumption, water usage, and e-waste information into its system? What is the minimum requirement to use its system?
I will start researching all of these questions and construct the IT sustainability picture from both the first point (the sustainability of IT itself) and the second point (the sustainability supported by IT).
Tags:
IT sustainabiity
measuring
sustainability
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