Government Technology

Sustainability, green and eco friendly are no longer simply marketing buzz words used to add a flourish to a new product. But as the public sector faces up to meeting targets, serious considerations must be made in risk management planning for IT operations in addition to management opening up to new ideas. Failure to do so could result in potentially serious disruptions to services, such as power outages and road crossing closures.
    
We have seen growing interest from the public sector in sustainable operations and the role of the data centre in meeting efficiency targets. This is hardly surprising, as it’s estimated that worldwide carbon emissions from data centres will quadruple by 2020; but that by 2011 we could reduce data centre peak load by the equivalent of up to 15 new power plants by adopting energy efficient practices.

New policies
In the drive to meet the sustainability challenge matched closely by government pressure to reduce costs in a difficult economic climate the government has introduced a series of legislations. Policies such as the Government Estate (SOGE) targets in 2006, the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres followed by European energy efficiency directives, forced the public sector to rethink its use of key resources such as energy supplies.
    
With renewed pressure around sustainability comes the added cost of the mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment. From April 2010, senior executives must ensure that these new responsibilities are brought into their risk management planning for their IT operations. In particular, as companies ‘green’ their operations with innovations such as the latest low energy, high density demand servers, they must ensure that they don’t inadvertently compromise the resilience of their systems by asking too much of their IT function’s data centres’ and supporting backup power systems.
    
But how will these fundamental changes affect daily operations? Can sustainable action plans be balanced with service needs and future spending cuts? Central government departments, the NHS, local authorities, and police forces and their partners will have to rethink and rationalise ICT infrastructures to meet energy efficiency targets.

Simple measures
Targeting major reductions in carbon emissions from data centres within the public sector and proposed cuts in public spending go together like chalk and cheese. The main problem facing the government is education on often simple methods the public sector can use to help towards more efficient data centre operations. These can include fitting blanking plates, hot aisle/cold aisle separation and increasing server inlet air temperatures. These tips are only the starting point. To make major inroads into reducing the carbon footprint and meeting the sustainability challenge will require significant investment. Whether this is at the physical infrastructure level, such as complete and physical separation of hot and cold air, the use of free-cooling coils in chillers or at the computational level in terms of server/SAN virtualisation, further advancements into government cloud computing – money, and plenty of it, will be required. With further predicted cuts in public sector expenditure, will the government’s green targets become a reality?
    
The problem facing many infrastructure managers is how to balance service transformation needs, sustainability targets and efficiency demands. In local government, Socitm’s review of 2008 conceded that despite progress on service reform, authorities had not organised their ICT operations towards sustainable targets. Too many authorities – like their private sector counterparts – are operating data centres but only spending on immediate technical problems. There are multiple approaches: where one authority maintains one central data centre, a neighbour will operate multiple data centres, posing different continuity and energy efficiency questions.
    
Can local authorities operate shared services data centres? on365 has seen very promising developments towards shared ICT resources among authority groupings. Certainly, planned system audits, linked to SOGE action plans, will help identify strategic needs and sustainable targets within a risk management framework.
    
However, cutting corners on maintenance or ‘greening’ ICT operations can be disastrous. on365 has seen road crossing closures and television studios blackouts because of inadequate checks on backup power and UPS systems. Rapid ‘greening’ of ICT operations has led to installation of energy efficient blade servers and other equipment that expose UPS and generator systems to loads they were not designed to accept. Sustainable operations are clearly underpinned by continual risk management and without effective planning, education and change, meeting ambitious government targets could be a hard task.