The ‘green’ business continuity manager
Let me open this article with a few questions... - Does your organisation have a ‘green’ initiative, a strategy to reduce your organisation’s environmental impact, underway? If the answers to these questions are a resounding ‘yes’ and you as a business continuity professional are actively involved, then I believe you are ahead of the green curve. Why? Because by identifying critical business activities through BIA and ensuring that your IT infrastructure is aligned, you will by default be optimising IT expenditures and eliminating waste within your organisation. Even if you are undertaking such an IT service continuity initiative you may not appreciate how many of the actions you are probably taking, driven by the findings of your BIA, will substantially contribute to green initiatives. Below I explain further. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a concept that organisations, especially (but not only) stock exchange listed corporations, have an obligation to consider in the interests of customers, employees, shareholders, communities and the environment. This obligation is seen to extend beyond their statutory obligation to comply with legislation. There is a strong case for companies to take CSR seriously on the understanding that they can not only meet their obligations but also on the additional understanding that by doing so, certain ‘financial factors’ can also be addressed in a positive manner. For example, by developing an environmental management system, based on the ISO 14001 standard, organisations should be able to promote their capability in environmental controls and further enhance the company brand. At the same time, lower operational costs can be realised, organisational risk reduced and a better competitive position gained through business differentiation and increased levels of efficiency, resilience and security. Where does the business continuity manager fit in all of this? SunGard Availability Services recently published UK disaster recovery invocation statistics which showed that power related disruptions were the fastest growing cause of customer disaster declarations - increasing by over 350 percent between 2005 and 2006. Given the extreme dependency that the data centre has on power supplies, anything that organisations can do to better manage power and cooling within IT environments and lessen the load on their supply systems the better their business continuity positioning will be. Integrating a ‘green’ approach into the business continuity management strategy can, therefore, lower risk, reduce costs and make better use of resources. If Gordon Gekko, the fictional character in the film ‘Wall Street’, was around to comment, perhaps today he might say: "Green, for lack of a better word, is good. Green is right. Green works. Green clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." IT - the biggest user of power Organisations are increasingly looking at the cost of their IT operational support to the business. Higher electricity costs are significantly increasing the total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure – in some cases, energy costs for the lifetime of hardware will exceed purchase price. According to Daniel Fleischer, senior research analyst for IDC, currently 70 percent of IT costs are operational expenses such as cooling, power and management. Not only is energy consumption becoming a significant business cost, it is also exposing the organisation to increased operational and business risk. Faced with a need to maintain competitive positioning within respective markets, companies are looking more to supportive IT functionality to help them differentiate and get new products and services to market quickly. The subsequent growth in IT ‘engine power’ has led to major increases in energy consumption; so much so that the demand for new data centre construction is on the increase. With energy costs rising, this issue is rapidly becoming a major business concern. The increasing demand for IT will severely test data centre operational viability by 2010 with average data centre operational costs expected to double between 2006 and 2010. Such predictions are raising some concerns within the IT community; they should also have the attention of the business continuity professional. Today, we are approaching the limits of power distribution in many data centres, with most legacy data centres unable to cope with a potential 100-150 percent increase in power/cooling requirements over the next few years. Recently, AFCOM’s Data Center Institute (DCI) conducted a membership survey of data centre managers and identified that the greatest facility problems within data centres were excessive heat and insufficient power, between them totalling 58 percent of the returns. The survey went on to say that most data centres have an inherent probability of failure by design of between 25-50 percent within the next five years. As a business continuity manager are you aware of this potential exposure? Other statistics included: - 81.2 percent of AFCOM members experienced a data centre failure in the past five years. The Institute went on to predict that between 2005 and 2010: - Power failures and limits on power availability will cause data centre outages at more than 90 percent of companies. As can be seen from the above, power supply issues need to be taken seriously. Not only is availability of computing resources at risk, there is a serious knock-on threat to the status of the organisation, which may lead to severe impacts on brand image, share price, customer retention and the ability to compete in an increasingly competitive global economy. Power, data growth and storage Within the data centre, servers and communications equipment continue to pose the highest IT energy consumption challenges, perhaps as high as 50 percent, with data storage close behind with about 30 percent attributed to it. According to a cross section of industry sources it is estimated that: - Structured data is growing at 30 - 40 percent per annum; The real problem with these rates of growth is not primarily the cost of storage hardware, as this appears to be halving every 18 months or so, but more of a problem of data and supporting infrastructure management together with the issues posed by the subsequent demands placed upon power and cooling systems. According to storage industry analyst Steve Duplessie, founder of the Enterprise Storage Group, open system storage utilisation is at best 50 percent today – and from this it is quite evident that these poor utilisation rates are reflected in higher energy consumption figures. Disk drives are the major power consumer for storage, so having the ability to deliver service from less drives is a primary consideration, however, to achieve this you will need some supportive, innovative technologies. Storage innovation, like Hitachi’s Controller-based Virtualization, Dynamic Thin Provisioning across the virtualized storage estate and the ability to power down disk drives either on demand or when not being accessed can deliver environmental advantages by reducing the need for excessive storage capacity and power use. Not only is there a clear environmental impact associated with growing data but also a growing issue of the organisation’s ability to manage operational risk, service delivery and cost controls. How can organisations ensure that a storage infrastructure delivers acceptable operational costs, reduced power consumption and at the same time enable the operational agility that is the requirement of today’s dynamics? Higher utilisation rates and agility from storage resources According to Gartner, “Future IT growth will require users to balance the increase in new server deployments with the constraints of key data center parameters. These include power, cooling and floor space.” I would venture to add that this observation could also include other aspects of IT and, especially, storage. If we look at resource management as the basis for a business continuity strategy and, in particular, how we can better manage and utilise the data storage resources, we should recognise that the highest levels of resource flexibility and agility deliver the highest levels of operational business continuity options based on cost, quality of service and risk mitigation. Lower infrastructure costs and power usage requirements can be realised from today’s innovative technologies and any organisational green strategy that is tied to a business continuity strategy will show great benefit both in reducing power usage and some of the risks associated with data centre power limitations. The rationalisation and consolidation of storage assets should be a primary aim when positioning to meet the objectives of creating effective storage management, better utilisation rates and more effective power management. The consolidated infrastructure can be built upon a tiered architecture model and overlaid with common management tools; including the data protection functionality being aligned to the value of specific parts of the storage pool. A ‘one size fits all’ approach to data resilience and security will either expose the organisation to unnecessary cost or unacceptable risk. Virtualization – helping with power and cooling reductions Virtualization has been a major focal point for both business continuity and IT professionals during 2007. Virtualization offers the highest levels of flexibility of physical resources, so by consolidating data storage assets into a single, virtual, managed pool complexity will be reduced and this simplification can, in itself, reduce power consumption and reduce operational risk exposure as the organisation grows. In addition to delivering a reduction in the power and cooling demands in the data centre, storage virtualisation, together with a thin provisioning capability, can deliver many additional business continuity benefits, including: - Enhanced management effectiveness of the current exponential data growth, reducing operational risk exposure. The mitigation of the risks associated with power usage is more than just an IT issue, it is a fundamental requirement for the organisation in its drive to succeed. Global energy concerns and environmental protection issues are gaining visibility with business, facilities, data centre and IT managers alike. These issues should also have the attention of business continuity managers. Author: Steve Beck MBCI MBCS CITP, business continuity and information security consultant, Hitachi Data Systems UK. Steve will be presenting on the above subject at the ‘BCM Challenges for 2008’ conference organised by Automata. The conference will be held at Beaumont House, Old Windsor between 31/1/8 to 1/2/08. The event will feature many other expert speakers and a debate and question time. In addition, to the main BCM agenda there will be two breakout streams the first for newcomers to BCM and the second for IT service continuity. See details at http://www.automataservices.com/conference.htm
•Date: 5th October 2007• Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: Power management |
