Cloud  
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We estimate further and higher education institutions spend around £147m a year on IT-related energy, according to our JISC-funded SusteIT project. In this article, we look at what one of our projects can share to help you reduce carbon emissions, save money, and respond to your students’ calls for you to be more environmentally conscious.

Your IT-related energy spend may seem to be on an inexorable upwards spiral due to rising energy costs and increasingly intensive computing demands, but we know you are also facing pressures to reduce your energy use.

Hardware is right in the firing line as it accounts for 15-20% of electricity demand in most universities and colleges so what can IT departments do to reduce their energy bills in the face of ever growing demands for more servers, storage and speed?

According to Martin Bennett, emeritus reader of sustainability accounting at the University of Gloucestershire, it comes down to your information and incentives.

“In most universities, energy costs are incurred centrally. They are not broken down into the various points where they are consumed so neither the information nor the incentives are there to make it possible for people to do anything about them. Essentially it is about providing more granular data on what’s being consumed and where it is being consumed, ultimately to try to identify why it is being consumed, and then to provide something in the system to encourage people to want to do something about it,” says Bennett.

“There are two issues with energy costs,” agrees Peter James, professor of environmental management at the University of Bradford. “The first is making them more visible than they currently are to decision-makers, particularly IT decision-makers. Secondly, it’s about giving those decision-makers reasons and incentives to actually do something to reduce them.”

Martin Bennett and Professor James have been leading with Forum for the Future a JISC-funded project looking into both these areas. Among the mechanisms the Responsible Energy Costs in Universities and Colleges (RECSO) project has considered are devolved energy budgeting, internal competition based on better information, shared savings schemes and improved measurement and sub-metering. The project has produced case studies to demonstrate how some of these incentives work in practice.

“Our Manchester case study, for example, shows how providing more information about energy consumption in buildings, which includes IT of course, can help drive behavioural change. The very detailed study we’ve done of the University of London computing centre offers an example of devolved budgeting for energy as well as for cooling and power supply costs, and how that has created the incentive for improvement. Our case study at the University of Cambridge of shared savings shows how an approach that gives some of the benefit of energy efficiency to a department or to a school can motivate improvement. We think these mechanisms should be more widely taken up by other universities,” says Professor James.

One of the areas in which the project has taken a particular interest is cloud computing – using a pool of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data, rather than local servers.

RECSO’s focus is understanding the full internal costs of providing an IT service so that there is a level playing field when making comparisons with cloud or shared service alternatives. Bennett notes that “At the moment we certainly see the lack of transparency as one of the most substantial barriers to cloud take-up and one of the areas where JISC can make the greatest difference by working with Janet, UCISA and others to create a better understanding of internal IT costs.”

This exercise has environmental implications because a large component of IT service costs can be energy use, and the related costs of equipment cooling and power supply. The environmental friendliness of the cloud is a matter of debate. In its recent report How Clean is Your Cloud, Greenpeace blasted Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, among other major tech companies, for an alleged dependence on coal and nuclear power to fuel data centres (although many suppliers dispute the figures). Professor James says that there are no definitive answers but that “there is certainly an environmental case for cloud if it enables economies of scale which reduce overall energy and resource consumption, and allows the location of data centres to be optimised for environmental purposes. This might include siting them in areas that are cool to reduce cooling requirements and in areas that have renewable energy, such as wind or solar, that could be used instead of dirty power.”

What’s not in doubt is that the cloud is going to have a major impact on the IT departments of further and higher education and on their energy business models. The cloud can be a “big enabler”, says Bennett. “I think one area where we’re likely to see a lot of changes is the business processes and administrative activities of universities where there is clearly a lot of duplication between individual institutions and therefore a lot of potential for cloud or shared solutions. It’s the universities that recognise and take the opportunities – without becoming cloud zealots – that are going to be more successful in the future. Many will need a lot of help to become accustomed to, and familiar with, a quite different way of doing business, as well as new technology.”

He believes that much of this help could come from us at JISC, both directly and through its support for Janet activities such as its cloud brokerage service. “All institutions can benefit from better cost transparency and information. Obviously, bigger ones have a lot of in-house technical ability and in some cases are actually inventing parts of the cloud for the future so they will need less assistance than smaller ones. For them, JISC could be particularly crucial in helping them understand what options they have, what they need to do in order to take advantage of them, and to develop the internal capacity to implement them effectively.”