By Barbara DePompa

ARRA, Modernization Efforts Drive Greater Energy Efficiency

A heightened awareness of IT power consumption costs, the increasing use of high performance, high-density computing technologies and the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are propelling government IT organizations toward greater energy conservation.

And it’s a good thing too, as one market research firm has estimated the U.S. government wastes $1 billion annually on poor desktop power management practices. According to research conducted by Steve Brasen, a principal analyst for Enterprise Management Associates, Inc., in Boulder, Colo., IT practices performed by government agencies (local, state and federal) have notoriously been the most wasteful of any industry demographic group. In the EMA research report entitled, The True Value of Green IT, the average weekly power consumption of desktop workstations used by government organizations is 46.31 kilowatt hours (KwH). “This was determined by calculating desktop utilization practices, including how often systems are left operational and how they utilize power saving features like sleep modes and hibernation,” Brasen said.

Based on an average national retail price of electricity for the commercial sector of $11.07/KwH, (compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy, August 2008), the average annual cost to power a single desktop government PC is $266.58. “With an installed base of 6.7 million deployed workstations, that translates to a whopping $1.7 billion in annual electrical costs to power these systems,” Brasen said.

According to EMA’s research, many federal, state and local government organizations would benefit from better system power consumption practices. EMA’s research showed that government desktop systems were kept fully ‘powered-on’ nearly half (48%) of the time during non-work hours, such as evenings and weekends, versus only 19% of the time in high technology organizations. Meanwhile, 29% of government workstations had the power saving features completely disabled, versus only 12% of high technology workstations.

The core of the problem for most government agencies stems from the financial infrastructure of the organizations. Most government institutions estimate operational costs, including electricity, based on past consumption and any expected growth, Brasen said. This funding is then set aside from the overall budget as an operational necessity. “The process allows very little incentive to reduce costs and streamline operations,” Brasen said.

Lacking fiscal incentives to reward reduced power consumption, government agencies require the enactment of regulatory mandates. At the U.S. federal level, the Environment Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are only mandated to identify, report and advise on government power utilization. “It would require congressional legislation to either directly mandate the reduction of federal IT power consumption or to empower the EPA and/or DOE to oversee reductions in energy consumption,” Brasen explained.

While the DoE has reported that the federal government is the largest energy consumer in the nation, renewed interest in reducing environmental impacts associated with excessive power consumption is helping to create a climate more conducive to achieving greater IT energy efficiency within government,” Brasen said.

Meanwhile the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included several large fiscal projects created to help drive greater energy efficiency in government environments. For instance, opportunities are great for technologies related to the emerging smart grid, which will create a nationwide electrical power system and will largely be reliant on solutions that store, distribute, manage and measure energy consumption. “While there appear to be many energy efficiency opportunities within the overall ARRA initiative, questions remain as to the speed with which federal agencies will be able to adapt and move forward in implementing far-reaching energy reduction improvements,” said Deniece Peterson, a principal analyst for INPUT.

That’s because after heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, data centers consume the most power in government buildings. The growth of servers and storage is also adding to the strain on power and cooling resources. Meanwhile, increasingly network-intensive software and services also consume ever more power.

As older data centers are upgraded and newer ones are built, it’s important to ensure that modernized infrastructures are highly energy and space efficient. Since the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) was signed into law in 2007, government agencies have been mandated to find new methods to improve energy efficiency. Government IT leaders should consider the power, space and cooling requirements of all data center components, and compare different architectures and systems to ascertain environmental and cost impacts across their data centers. Other suggestions from industry observers that will help improve energy efficiency include:

*The ability to track resource usage, carbon emissions and efficient utilization of resources, such as power and cooling, are important.

*Strive to implement policies that can help conserve power, reduce cooling costs, maintain availability and support disaster recovery.

*Calculate how much electricity the data center currently uses and document the link between direct IT power utilization and costs avoided.

*Institute a four-year refresh cycle on computers.

*Use only Energy Star® rated monitors and computers, as those monitors go to sleep after 10 minutes and CPUs go to sleep after 30 minutes.

*Uninstall equipment that has become technologically obsolete. Industry observers estimate that up to 30 percent of servers in any given data center are no longer in active production, although they continue to consume energy.

*Storage area networks (SANs), improved storage management practices and higher density tape backup subsystems can also help lower energy costs and save space.

While encryption and security protections may wreak havoc on battery power, that’s considered a small price to pay for greater security, he said. Meanwhile, another growing trend among wireless technology providers involves working with cellular technology providers to access their networks to verify the status of cellular towers and help users identify, for instance, when a cellular tower is down so they can clearly see why email may be temporarily unavailable, Brasen explained.

On the horizon, Brasen expects that there will soon be growing support for heterogeneous technologies to help bridge gaps in managing and supporting both Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. Centralized management is an even bigger challenge for Apple, which doesn’t currently allow third party agents to run on its iPhone, making it impossible to centrally manage these devices. “The big question for Apple is, when will the company Apple address this acknowledged situation, by allowing third party agents to run on iPhones?” Brasen asked.

Further out, virtualization is likely to play a key role in “allowing users to run a variety of virtual applications on handheld devices, which will increasingly be used for more ‘laptop-typical’ computing applications in the coming years,” he explained.