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Sustainable IT in Universities and Colleges June 21, 2008

Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: Events, General, Green Computing, 1 comment
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Sustainable IT is a subject that is going to be more and more important for all Higher Education institutions.

I must admit I didn’t realise how important Sustainable IT was until I attended an energy efficiency workshop at Cardiff University. The workshop is part of a series of events, all of which are part of the Managing environmentally sustainable ICT project by JISC and Sust-IT

All of the presentations were really interesting, Cardiff University also arranged a tour of their brand new server room and High-performance computing (HPC) cluster. It was really good workshop and I’m already signed up for the next event about New Ways of Working

Apparently the use of natural gas in power stations is decreasing and the use of coal is on the increase. When one of the panel described computers as being ‘Coal Powered’ it certainly made me look differently at IT. I’m now planning a complete review of our server rooms and an investigation into exactly how much electricity we use, and where the inefficiencies are. The panel also made the point that going green is not only good for the environment, there are also huge cost savings that can be made by adopting greener practices. As students become more and more interested in the green credentials of an institution the electricity usage, efficiency and carbon footprint of an institution will become a factor that students begin to consider when selecting an institution.

The rising cost of electricity means that we all have to start taking notice of the electricity we use, if we don’t then energy bills will spiral out of control and cuts in other areas will have to be made to enable institutions to pay their bills. This might sound like doom mongering, but the panel explained that in the private sector decisions to cut staffing and other resources are already being made because of the high cost of electricity.

The British Computer Societey are working on an EU Code of Conduct for server rooms / data centres. Institutions will be able to sign up to the code of conduct when a final version of the document comes out later on this year. I will be looking into this Code of Conduct, and if possible I would like to get Edge Hill signed up to the document. Institutions signing up to the code will be given some EU marketing materials to display withing the institution. Signing up for this EU recognised Code of Conduct would further enhance the green credentials of the institution.

Core Services: One year on June 18, 2008

Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: General, Green Computing, Team News, add a comment
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The Core Services team was formed in June 2007, which makes the team one year old! It doesn’t seem like a year since my first blog post.

The past year has been really interesting and challenging, and in all honesty I’ve enjoyed working on all the different projects. The team has come together quite nicely and we now have a wide range of skills available within the team. This summer will see our most ambitious plans to date, I just hope we can keep up the momentum we have built up over the past year. In the next few months we will be looking at virtualising more services and reducing the amount of physical servers in use. We will also be looking at improving the SunRay thin client service and reducing the running and support costs of the Core IT Services. We will also be rolling out more SunRay devices to some key areas of the institution, one of the bigger projects for the summer will be to implement a new institutional data backup system.

Looking over the previous blog posts I realised that I haven’t been at an external event or conference for some time. I thought it was about time I attended a conference as so far this year the rest of the team have been having all the fun!

The blog entries show that members of the team have attended Infosec 2008, a Salford Software Technical Update Event , and I’m sure there have been more events that haven’t been blogged !

I’m visiting Cardiff University on the 19th June for a ‘Sustainable IT in Universities and Colleges’ workshop. The workshop will explore issues around energy efficient configuration, cooling and power supply in computer server rooms, I’ll be looking for ideas or changes that will make our computer room more efficient. I’ll try and blog something about my thoughts and ideas tomorrow evening.

Do we all need PCs? June 20, 2007

Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: General, Green Computing, 10 comments
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I spent Tuesday at the Esteem ‘Higher Education Strategy Forum’ in Edinburgh.

One the agenda were some really interesting topics such as Sustainable Computing and Becoming an Eco-University. One of the presentations that really fired my imagination was a presentation from SUN Microsystems about their Sun Ray 2 Desktop devices. The Sun Ray is basically a dumb terminal, it doesn’t have a hard drive or cpu. All the computing work is done by a back end server. There is actually no software installed onto the Sun Ray 2 device.
The user inserts a card into the device which connects the Sun Ray 2 to the back end server. The user is the presented with their desktop. One of the impressive things about the Sun Rays is that if a user needs to swap desks, they simply pull out the card (without logging off or shutting down any applications) and insert this into another Sun Ray. When the card is inserted into the second Sun Ray they are presented with the same applications they were using on the previous Sun Ray.

The Sun Ray never needs upgrading, doesn’t have any parts that would need replacing and because it doesn’t have any software installed it means that it can be deployed quickly. The salesman I was talking to claims a Sun Ray can be out of the box and installed in under a minute. The power used by the Sun Ray is only 4watts, from a Green Computing and Energy saving point of view this is superb.

This brings me to my point, Do we need PCs ? Do we all really use our dual processor, quad cores and 80GB hard drives? The answer is almost certainly NO. The PCs that we are currently deploying to desktops are more powerful than some of the servers currently in use on the network. We roll out new PCs to keep up with new releases of Windows and we increase the memory in the PCs to deal with the more resource hungry applications. Sun Rays would put an end to this, they would never need upgrading, there is very little that can fail and they are future proof as all the work is done by the back end server. IT Services are planning a visit to the SUN Offices later on this month, and there is an excellent chance that you might even see some of these Sun Ray devices on a desktop near you soon.

Going Green – How hard can it be? June 9, 2007

Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: Green Computing, 5 comments
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We are all obliged to look after our planet and to minimise our impact on the environment. There are a number of campaigns and environmental groups telling us that we should reduce our CO2 emissions by taking public transport, reducing car usage, lowering our heating thermostats and installing energy efficient light bulbs. We are also obliged to recycle as much waste as we can.

The life blood of the service my team provides is electricity. We’ve got racks and racks of electricity consuming hardware that sucks in electricity on one side and throws out waste heat on the other. This waste heat then has to be cooled by electricity guzzling air conditioning units. All that electricity usage has an effect on CO2 emissions and there will be a carbon footprint associated with it. Sounds bad doesn’t it, but I’m not done yet. Most desks at Edge Hill have a Personal Computer on them and then we have the numerous open access areas filled with PCs. Each of these PCs comprises of base unit and a monitor both of which use electricity all day. Some of these PCs will be left on at weekends and in many cases overnight.

The good news is that Core Services is going to start to look at using more energy efficient servers, server virtualisation and recycling old servers. This will all help to reduce our carbon footprint and CO2 emissions.

The best news about going green is that it most people at Edge Hill can make a difference without any effort. According to the Carbon Trust, one PC left on all day will cost about £37 a year. But if switched off at night and at weekends, this drops to nearer £10 a year and saves an equivalent amount of energy to making 34,900 cups of coffee. We do need to start some where, and as it turns out it is not hard to start going green. To start you should simply;

Turn off your computer when it’s not being used !