HP Adaptable Sustainability ?

HP in Australia recently held its  second annual Technology@Work end-user conference in Sydney; this year a (regional) analyst conference was run side by side with the end-user event. 

Paul Brandling, Vice President and Managing Director for HP South Pacific, gave the welcoming speech (see video), and introduced the event tag line of “Alternative thinking about business, technology and sustainability”, which featured all hp logo’s in a wonderfully environmental fluorescent lime green. During his keynote Mr. Brandling made the point that, “Globally over 50% of large enterprises will face data center floor space shortages in the next five years. Forcing many to relocate, our outsource, some of their applications.”

Dr David Morgan (a director of BHP, ex-CEO of Westpac, and recently co-chaired the “Future of the Australian Economy” stream at the 2020 summit) , gave an excellent keynote.  A video is to be put on the TAW08 website in the next few days, and is recommended. Major themes here were adaptability in the future planning for the Australia Economy, as well as regular references to the need for more federal legislation to replace up to eight state/regional legislative frameworks.

In the follow on meetings HP played its sustainability card. Highlighting a recent reduction from 85 worldwide data centers to now three pairs of two datacenters for the company. The associated power savings were enough to run the US city of Palo Alto (approx. same size as Darwin, Australia), whilst at the same time the company more than doubled its processing capability and storage capacity. 

It seems “IT as a utility” is being finally realized, at least within the top of the Fortune 5000 set (cf. HP, Westpac, and BT recently). A fundamental driver has to be a review of the cost of worldwide IP communications for these multinational companies.

Some in the industry remain skeptical as to the real value of ‘Green IT’ as an initiative. So it was interesting to note some of the examples to support the Green IT move. It was quoted that information computer technology (ICT) is estimated to be responsible for 4% worldwide carbon emissions (2% client products [e.g.: PC’s etc], 2% Data Centers). This is in contrast to aviation as a whole, which is only estimated to be responsible for 2% of emissions. 

The ENERGY STAR  label is now on major appliances such as office equipment, lighting, home electronics, and more. Computer equipment included in the ENERGY STAR program today includes desktop, notebook, tablet and workstations.  ENERGY STAR ratings for servers are coming and expected within 18 months. Whilst an ENERGY STAR rating for complete Data Centers is now on the drawing board.

So just how meaningful are these ENERGY STAR ratings ? The US Federal Government currently spends approximately $300M USD pa on energy costs. It is expected that a move from ENERGY STAR 3 to ENERGY STAR 4 equipment, would result in savings of $82M per annum. Now, that’s meaningful in both an environmental and economic context.