It is a common belief that government sector, especially public sector holdings, have scant regard for the resources that they use; be it power or capital. Since, profitability is not the prime concern; the companies suffer from an overpowering lethargy that makes make them inept and unproductive.
In fact, this languorous attitude of the government sector has been tagged and dubbed under the term 'sarkari'. And yet, nothing would be farther from the truth, when one considers the current scenario. While, indeed the government sector and the PSU firms did suffer from varying amount of 'sarkariness' in the past, the scene is quite different today, as they take on the competition from the private sector and the MNCs. The PSUs of today are quite unlike the PSUs of yore.
Corollary, the head of IT at these companies is quite a different person and has a whole set of new challenges that he or she has to tackle on a daily basis.
Of late, among the whole lot of issues that confront the IT head, there is one issue that is turning out to be fairly critical and that is to reduce the opex even as the company looks to expand its services or product portfolio.
The IT head is caught in a Catch-22 situation, on one hand power consumption needs to come down and on the other the infrastructure should be scalable and ready for growth.
Dubbed as green, the measures adopted by the IT head are not only good from the environmental perspective (which we have already touched in the earlier piece) but also from the economic one. And usually the start of the greening exercise happens at the level, wherein policies, procedures and hardware are implemented to reduce the power consumption by the data centre by a significant level.
Considering, the amount of power a typical data centre guzzles, it is not surprising at all that it also happens to be the first port-on-call for the greening exercise. Typically in a data centre, the power consumption is as follows: 50 per cent for cooling, 37 per cent for running the IT infrastructure, 10 per cent conversion loss and 3 per cent lighting.
Thus, there is quite a scope in terms of reducing the power consumption, but the IT head also has numerous challenges at hand and he or she needs to face while going green. Here is a lowdown on what could be the possible pitfalls that need to be avoided in the journey.
Audit first
According to an old maxim, which is much relevant even today, you cannot reduce what you cannot measure. Hence the biggest and the first step that an IT head at a government department or a PSU firm has to take is to conduct an energy audit.
The primary aim of this audit is to find out how and where is the power being utilised and in what manner. Ideally, the best way to do this exercise is to start measuring the amount of money spent on power consumption over a period of time say something like three or six months.
The challenge here lies is that for a government sector the infrastructure is usually in a hap-hazard manner and spread all over the place. Thus measuring the power consumption on an individual level becomes quite a bit tricky. Nonetheless, that should not stop one from digging deeper and finding out where the biggest demand for power coming from in the datacenter. Once the details are in place, you can start taking action.
Tech challenges
Primilarily, the biggest challenge that arises is usually in terms of the hardware. Usually the government sector or the PSUs firms have a huge legacy infrastructure that gets build over a period of time. This architecture is more or less ad-hoc and gets built over time depending upon the need and the requirement of the company. Dispensing it away for the sake of greener and more efficient equipment is usually not a preferred mechanism or a choice.
The first step would be to make a checklist of all the equipment within the organisation. Once that data is collated, the IT head needs to assign priorities to his infrastructure, in the sense, this server is relatively new and can work on for a year or two more or this server is old and should be replaced immediately.
Shifting from legacy infrastructure is very fine balance, do it fast and you will be wasting a lot of time and creating complexity; do it too slow and by the time you have refurbished the infrastructure it is already archaic and needs to be changed.
Business Benefits
To go green you need to sell green first. The idea of green needs to be sold to the top management and to the workers as well, the buy in is very crucial. To get the same, it is essential to talk the same language as that of the CEO.
Hence the first step is to create a cost benefit analysis, wherein the expenditure is plotted against the gains that will accrue over a period of time. Make a business case out of the green initiative and present it in a fashion that is palatable and understandable to the non-techie person. The benefit of such an approach is two-fold, first it helps in getting the go ahead from the top management, and secondly it sets the course for future action.
In the government vertical, Cisco has deployed data centre solution in Oeiras Municipal, a local authority in Lisbon, to improve the provision of e-government services and applications and improve staff productivity. Oeiras Municipal is using Cisco’s Data Centre 3.0 infrastructure transformation architecture as a blueprint to rationalize and maximize data centre resources and make them more efficient.
The local government in Zurich has also deployed Cisco data center solution which is helping to increase the quality of service to the community, improve reliability and performance of business systems and reduce the cost of computing resources.
The DTO (Defence Telematics Organisation) – the IT arm of the Dutch Ministry of Defence is using Cisco data centre solutions to improve service provision, making maintenance operations more efficient and significantly reduce IT costs.
Green Roadmap
One of the most difficult step for an IT Head in a government organisation is to create a strategic roadmap, since there are so many levels of approval that it needs. But given the challenges, the importance of a roadmap cannot be underplayed either.
To successfully engineer a green strategy, there needs to be a green roadmap. Create one for the data centre detailing the steps that needs to be taken in the coming days with the possible timelines. The roadmap could for instance talk about the proposed consolidation of server infrastructure into a central location in a phase wise manner.
Technology service providers like Cisco are trying hard to make its IT products, applications, services, and practices more and more environment conducive which have now become an economic and an environmental imperative, as well as social responsibility for all corporates.
Optimise or Rebuild
Greening a data centre also poses a big challenge in terms of decision making, should the IT head go in for a new infrastructure that is built from scratch is power efficient and green or should he or she look to optimise the current infrastructure.
It is a tricky question and often based on the current state of the data centre. Usually, the thumb rule in such instances is to optimise that is on hand and build green in the future. Thus, if the IT head has to put up a new state data centre in the coming months, it could then be made green from the design phase itself. Meanwhile the existing data centre needs to be tackled in a piecemeal approach, one bit at a time.
Virtualisation & the cloud
Virtualisation, these days, is hyped as a panacea for all the server ills and it has been gaining immense ground. Essentially, virtualisation helps in provisioning of new machines dynamically out of the same IT infrastructure through the means of software portioning.
Not only that, it can also help in doing away with a lot of servers that are essentially lying idle and merely consuming power. The IT head needs to evaluate how he or she can utilise the power of virtualisation at his place. The key here is not to look at virtualisation as a piecemeal technology but on an overall holistic scale. Thus virtualising storage and the network is very critical to derive the full benefits of overall efficient resource utilization.
Another technology that is gaining immense credence is the SaaS model or cloud. Simply put, this lets an organisation host all its applications and data on a hosted server and thus curtail the cost of infrastructure.
This model is not only cost effective, but also is highly scalable and green. Considering the disparate infrastructure of the a government undertaking, it makes complete sense for the IT head to make use of the cloud services to essentially host all the redundant activities, while retaining the mission-critical functioning within its own premises.
Getting help
Finally, the IT head need not constantly burn the midnight oil to know the latest on green technology and products. The best way to go about this process is to partner with a solution provider who is fairly renowned for green products and also has a good practice of the same. For instance, Cisco runs a Data centre Assurance Program that does a complete analysis and suggests the alternatives of the existing infrastructure, thereby aiding in the green initiatives.
In the end, it is important to remember that there are challenges galore in going green, but the benefits both in terms of environmental and economic are just too good, so as not to go green. And as the government sector and PSUs chalk the strategy to be more competitive and profitable, green could be a potent weapon in their armoury.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Shashwat DC
Quelle/Source: iGovernment, 22.12.2009
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