Harsimran Singh, New Delhi, June 8, 2009
The Economic Times
Green is the new black as Indian companies step up their efforts to turn environment-friendly and cut costs thereof.
Power savings, density computing, virtualisation, accurate air-conditioning and cheap printing are some of the measures being adopted by enterprises to save both on their costs and, of course, emission levels.
Kotak Mahindra Bank estimates a saving of Rs 4.5 crore, due to the power savings, incurred from consolidation of its existing data centre into a new one. The new data centre has smart cooling which reduces power consumption and emissions further.
Religare Enterprises has reduced its power costs by 30-35 percent by incorporating three modular data centres. IBM has designed the green data centres for Religare in Delhi, Noida and Mumbai as part of the $3.1 million agreement signed with the company.
Leveraging such technologies like high density computing, virtualisation and precision air-conditioning, Religare expects a saving of more than 3600 units (KWH) per day in power consumption. In a year, this represents a saving of about Rs 1 crore.
Energy efficient data centres has reduced IT administration costs, thus enabling personnel to work on more value-added projects. IBM has executed data centre projects exceeding 350,000 square feet for about 60 clients.
“With green computing, the savings are substantial - for an average 25,000 square foot data centre, clients are able to achieve 30-40 percent energy savings,” says Nipun Mehrotra, VP & general manager, Global Technology Services, IBM India and South Asia.
What seemed off-the-charts expensive propositions are now potentially profitable alternatives ushering in welcome innovations. The change does not exist just inside the data centre. Even outside, companies claim to combine hardware, software and services to reduce overall energy costs of clients by 15 percent-40 percent.
“Our server systems are capable of up to 37 percent lower overall power consumption in high demand environments,” adds Mehrotra.
Rival HP has taken to virtualisation and smart cooling of data centres. “We have cut down our global count of data centres from 85 to three in three years! With this our data centre floor space has come down by 33 percent. It has also resulted in a saving of $33 million and 380M kWh," says Jean-Claude Vanderstraeten, director for environment, Hewlett Packard, Asia Pacific and Japan.
According to US-based research firm, InfoEdge, server virtualisation can reduce hardware acquisition costs by 40 percent and reduce maintenance costs by 25 percent-50 percent.
As costs increase, ideas emerge and are copied pronto. So, initiatives like duplex printing (printing on both sides of the paper) are being used by companies like Xerox, HP and Canon to save power.
“We have designed solutions which can identify whether a user needs a colour printer. The solution allots printers accordingly. We have also taken to duplex printing in a big way,” says Alok Bharadwaj, senior VP Canon India.
HP’s duplex printing move has resulted in savings of 800 tonne of paper per year and in monetary terms about $7 million per annum. It has reduces paper spend and associated costs of HP by 25 percent.
Telecom giant Nokia is also adopting many green initiatives, especially for consumers. Recently, it launched a pilot programme to plant a tree sapling for every handset dropped for recycling at its stores, irrespective of the brand.
Retail companies too are paying attention to the re-tale. “We at Tesco have undertaken conscious initiatives to go green. With simple steps like using solar-water heating for our kitchens and gyms, switching to LED lighting system, maintaining infrastructure software to hibernate our desktop systems have considerably reduced our carbon emissions,” says Captain Dayalu Arasappa, head (support, facilities & chief security officer), Tesco, Bangalore.
Small is all the more beautiful it can help being cost-effective. Cisco is discovering that by reducing the font size in its product manuals. Cisco now saves $1 million in printing costs and 22 million sheets of paper annually by just reducing font size.
Other big move by Cisco is converting paper manuals to CDs, thus saving 2.7 million sheets of paper a year.
On the other hand Mumbai-based IT services company Patni claims to save 50 percent electricity at its Green Knowledge Centre, Noida, as 75 percent of its area receives natural daylight. The building is also equipped with motion sensor lights.
With so many green initiatives, measuring carbon footprint of companies is also becoming a priority. Applied Materials aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 50,000 tonne by 2012. Cisco plans to reduce business air travel by 10 percent. Companies are truly getting down to earth.
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