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Going ³Green´ is a mission of many companies around the globe not just for reasons of
environmental responsibility, but also for cutting costs in these extremely tight economic
times. á

  efforts represent a specific focus area within enterprises that hold
attention to this trend. Green IT leverages information technology to streamline
operations, cut costly waste, and reduce the impact on the environment. IT typically
consumes only about 10% of an organization¶s energy costs, but the net effect of a
Green IT project is to go beyond just energy saving. To tackle the other 90%, a Green
IT project extends into a variety of other departments, and to execute such an endeavor
requires an effective project management function in order to identify and prioritize
goals. A Green IT transformation can be a complex process. This case study explores
the use of the HostedDatabase.com  




web application for managing
a Green IT project that insures good environmental stewardship. In the process, we¶ll
outline many of the contemporary tasks included in such an effort. We¶ve also set up a
demo application that you¶re welcome to run and explore.

With the demo you can get some ideas about how you might structure your own Green
IT project for your company.
‡ Go to www.HostedDatabase.com,
‡ Click the  

 button
‡ Enter ³GreenIT´ for Account Name, User Name and Password and click the  
button.
‡ Select the ³GreenIT´ application from the list and click the  
button.


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Number of project tasks ± 16

Project duration ± 16 months
Project budget ± $1,200,000
Number of users ± 50






 
 

The company, a manufacturer of hardware products for businesses and consumers with
$175 million in annual revenue, was asked by the board of directors to plan and
implement an enterprise-wide Green IT initiative. A green team was selected consisting
of managers from nearly all departments needed to participate in the project in terms of
defining tasks, assigning priorities, managing the status of various tasks, adjusting
target dates, maintaining the budget and keeping good notes that document issues
along the way. The action plan for a Green IT project included four primary components:
revising processes and metrics, optimizing efficiency of existing IT assets, revamping
architecture and infrastructure, and positioning IT to enable green business practices.
The components can be broken up into individual tasks in support of the Green IT
project:

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$ 
 ± Server virtualization is the most popular power-saving strategy
for data centers. The process involves replacing physical servers with virtual servers
controlled by hypervisor software running on fewer physical servers.

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 ± For a quick ROI, the company plans to use CPU power
throttling which is projected to result in 14% energy savings on existing equipment,
hardware and operating system software that supports it.

‡ # & c 
 ± Capping the power drawn by servers. The power capping
eliminates the need for over provisioning, allowing the company to reclaim trapped
energy. The power allocations will be set in advance, based on previous server history.

‡ 
#&  ± The goal is to cut the amount of time PCs are powered
on by more than half, from 21 hours to 10.3 hours daily, estimating it will save about
$750,000 on energy annually by deploying active power management solutions. Studies
show that PCs stay on more than double the amount of time they need to. This
translates to an amount of wasted energy that costs about $150 per system per year.

‡   
#'  ± Alternative energy sources is an important characteristic of
a green data center so the company will investigate relocating the data center where
wind or hydro power is widely available. The company will also explore the use of solar
energy rather than diesel for backup.

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&( &± The companyshall determine the energy draw
in kilowatts for each type of IT equipment. The energy draw can be obtained from
manufacturers, or by using a tool like Kill-a-Watt from P3 which shows how much power
a piece of equipment is consuming. For example, the average PC draws between 60-
250 watts (0.25 KW). These numbers can be annualized by figuring out how many
hours per year each asset is running.
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± The company plans to follow the trend that 40% of
companies already have in place, computer hardware recycling. Company issued cell
phones will be part of this initiative.

‡ (   c  c + ,   ± The company plans to determine data center

usage on a per department basis so more use is charged back more heavily to the
department with the most use.

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 & ± The company plans to reduce data center
operational costs and carbon footprints by reducing the amount of power needed to run
and cool the facilities. To do this, the company will recycle more than 302,000 gallons of
water a day at the data center and will also collect rainwater off its roof and store it
underground in a 50,000 gallon tank for cooling IT systems.

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± Thought should be given to understanding how
much power custom developed software applications will use even as they are being
coded. The company¶s IT department shall advise developers to determine which query
method for example, might save a watt of energy and choose that method even if it
might make the process slower by a nanosecond or two.

‡ 
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 ± The company¶s data center must be more
energy efficient by deploying sensors measuring nearly all power consumption. The
company will measure total data center energy use every 15 minutes and monitor at the
subsystem level. This will develop baseline metrics and find trouble spots, taking
measurements over the course of a year. The stated goal is to increase CPU utilization
by 10% and cut power use by 5%. The long term goal is to obtain EPA Energy Star
rating for the data center. The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) score compares the
overall amount of energy used in the datacenter for all functions including computing,
cooling, and power distribution, to the amount that just goes into computing. A lower
PUE is better and a value of 1 is the goal.

‡ 
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  ± The company plans to encourage employees to
print on both sides of paper and cut duplicate printing. The company shall also initiate a
campaign to have employees turn off their screens if they are going to be away.

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 ± The company will select SaaS solutions for the
cost savings, but the move also can be seen as a green investment.

‡  
  
 ± The company shall institute guidelines to replace eco-
unfriendly air travel with tools for virtual work, such as instant messaging (IM) and
teleconferencing. In addition, general telecommuting programs shall be instituted.
IT¶srole is significant when putting a telecommuting policy in place.

‡ c + .
c  ± The company plans to develop a web-based carbon
footprint calculator to estimate CO2 emissions.
‡   

  
 ± The company shall develop IT solutions to encourage
customers to take advantage of paperless billing and payments.



 
 
 

In order to make the project management application readily available to all participating
parties over the web, the company chose to use an on-demand software solution from
HostedDatabase.com. The Project Management application is quick to set-up and
simple to use.

 
 

The HostedDatabase.com Greent IT Project Management application only contains a

single project although the software can be used to manage any number of projects.
Each project is defined in the View Projects tab which contains project-level data such
as project name, project manager, category, priority, status, date range, budget, etc. By
clicking on the View Tasks tab, you can see all the various tasks associated with the
project. Project tasks can be sorted in a number of ways such as by the Start Date field.
From this single page, the status of the entire project can be summarized. Individual
tasks can be updated by clicking on the hourglass icon on the left side of each task.The
project task detail view provides access to specific data elements pertaining to the task
suchas task name, assigned to (employee responsible), start date, projected/actual
completion date,priority/status indicators, percent complete, cost in dollars and days,
resources required,description and notes.Application users may run the application and
update/maintain these data elements on an asneededbasis and only if the appropriate
permissions have been given to the user. For example,some users may have view-only
privileges while others may edit task information (but not add ordelete tasks). It is up to
the account administrator to assign appropriate privileges for eachapplication
user.Account administrators may create any number of application users and assign
them to specificapplication instances. An application instance is created whenever you
use the c



 
tool in the Control Panel. You can create any number
of instances of any applicationtype. For example, you can create a Project Management
application for your business andanother for your church¶s food drive. The number of
concurrent users allowed (users running anapplication at the same time) depends on
the number of 

 
you subscribe to. If you have5 user seats, then any 5 of your
defined users can be running applications at once.









 



The Green IT Project Management application provided the means for the company to
effectively manage a significant enterprise-wide project. The new on-demand project
management application replaced a traditional on-premise software package that ran on
the company¶s internal network. By opting for a hosted application, the company was
able to avoid software upgrade and support fees charged by the vendor. In addition, the
company avoided the need to use internal IT resources to manage software updates.
HostedDatabase.com software updates are centralized and instantly available to all
customers. Further, there was no need for hardware or operating system and enterprise
database software licenses. But the biggest benefit was the flexibility of accessing the
project management application from any web browser from any location with an
Internet connection. Instant costs savings were realized by engaging
HostedDatabase.com software in the cloud.


 
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Green IT uses the HostedDatabase.com Application account service.


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Monthly subscription fee of $247.50.

50 user-seats (concurrent users) may access the application.
Unlimited number of application instances.
Unlimited bandwidth for data transfer.
Unlimited application data storage.
Unlimited and free technical support.