Last week Dell attended the Guardian's popular Public Services Summit conference at which I participated in a panel discussion on the topic of "Doing more with less CO2".
Sustainability always raises a number of interesting debates within the sector and alongside Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes and Will Day, from the Sustainable Development Committee, we attempted to tackle but a few.
Naturally at Dell, we take a technology-focused view of driving down emissions and creating efficiencies. However, the public sector must not take it for granted that the person labelled facilities manager or chief information officer should be the only one tasked with investigating how technology can make a positive difference to hitting EU targets and contributing to a more sustainable future for public services.
In the midst of a perfect storm
I think it's fair to say that we're in the midst of a perfect storm: challenged public budgets, decreasing tax revenues and increasing national debts on the one hand and being asked to meet aggressive national and EU government energy reduction targets on the other.
As part of its recently revised Greening IT Strategy, the UK Government has set out two key targets: government IT will be carbon neutral by 2012, and carbon neutral across its lifecycle by 2020.
These targets present no small task for a sector under pressure to lead by example and yet also under the misconception that green efficiencies can only be created by massive short-term investment. It's difficult to put into perspective the size of the job in hand, but I would think you might be surprised to learn that emissions from IT account for 5% of the global total, putting it on a par with the airline industry, itself a sector much maligned in the great green debate.
Perhaps fortunately for us, unlike the airline industry, just by following simple best practice guidelines we can earn a number of short terms wins.
I'm not suggesting that the larger goal won't require great amounts of time and investment , but rather that the public sector is in a position where it needs to have both demonstrable results quickly and a long term, sustainable strategy.
When engaging with a customer for the first time or embarking upon a new project, my teams often pay a visit to their datacentre. This could be anything from the standard "computer room" in their offices to a warehouse the size of two football pitches stacked with thousands of servers. Despite the obvious size differences there is a striking similarity: if I walked in and unplugged 15%-20% of their servers at random, chances are that most of the users supported by that datacentre wouldn't bat an eyelid.
The reason for this is that each server has such a low utilisation rate (ie the amount of resource it is using to process at any one time), that most of them are doing very little. The problem with operating in this way is that the servers are still using energy to run and stay cool, as well as taking up valuable floor space and adding considerable administrative overheads. A few years ago, average public sector server utilisation was a poor 12% - and this has now dropped to an embarrassing 5%.
The ideal running rate of a server should be about 80%, so the sector is using almost 16 times the space and energy really required.
So what can be done about these massive levels of over-provisioning and wastage?
G-Cloud
The UK government is already making strides in the right direction with plans for its G-Cloud. In a nutshell, the G-Cloud will be a large shared pool of computer resource and services to provide departments with a platform from which to build flexible and innovative public services. Rather than rely on isolated blocks of their own data, departments will share resources across government.
This initiative alone could save up to £300m by 2020 and although it's a longer term aspiration that is still in the planning phases, all public sector leaders can begin to think about some of the short term changes that could easily be implemented in their own datacentres. Without boring you with the minutiae, there are proven, readily available and easy to implement technologies such as virtualisation that could help public organisations consolidate their servers through more intelligent utilisation.
By running several "virtual" servers on a single physical machine, computer resources are more efficiently allocated, allowing organisations to quickly realise energy savings.
Although quick wins can be easily favoured, there is a much harder, longer term shift in culture and thinking that must take place across the public sector if we're to come close to hitting new targets.
Whether it's the simple notion of working policies such as being an eco-friendly user and turning off PCs and monitors overnight, or a more fundamental change in greening the government's ageing procurement policies, we believe that placing sustainability at the heart of decision making and working across departments will be crucial ingredients in the recipe for success.
As my co-panel speaker Simon Day rightly stated, there's a great deal more opportunity than risk out there at the moment. I believe it's simply a case of seeking the right advice, communicating at every level and not losing sight of the long term objective.
Undoubtedly, however, there is a long way to go.
Iain Campbell is director and general manager, Dell UK Public Sector
