Rising fuel prices, carbon footprints and e-waste have grabbed the attention of state and local government leaders, causing many to turn their operations inside out to reach “green” goals. After installing compact fluorescent light bulbs and purchasing alternative fuel vehicles, some are attending to the power demands of computer equipment and data centers. Motivated by the desire to increase efficiency and save money on shrinking budgets, some governments have begun consolidating IT operations, thereby reducing heating, cooling and power needs. But, if greener IT changes are not carefully planned and commanded by top leaders, governments are in danger of overspending and unintentionally over polluting.

It's not easy being green

The challenge of making green IT a priority begins with defining it. “Mayors are waking up to this emerging issue,” says Alan Shark, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Public Technology Institute. “They're realizing they can't wait for the federal government to make certain determinations, and they see this as something they possibly have some control over. But there is a lack of standards. It is a patchwork of different kinds of remedies.”

Green IT can mean buying hardware made with lower levels of hazardous materials, limiting the use of polluting energy sources or establishing an e-cycling program — or at least a conscientious computer disposal policy. But to most governments, “green” fits none of those descriptions.

A November research report on green data centers published by Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec included a public sector supplement that polled 250 respondents, 42 of which were state, city or county governments with at least 5,000 employees. The study asked data center managers to rank their green priorities, and more than half said the most important was increasing energy efficiency. “It's pretty clear what the public sector thinks is green — it's power consumption,” says Sean Derrington, director of storage management for Symantec's Data Center Management Group.

While energy efficiency takes priority over end-of-life or recycling issues, implementing sound energy initiatives comes with a host of challenges. According to Shark, purchasing decisions and operational policies are chief among them. “Until recently, looking at Energy Star-rated equipment wasn't necessarily part of any checklist,” he says. “But when we purchase, we need to have a better idea of what it is we're getting, not just in terms of savings from performance, but energy performance.”

Shark points out that many governments are moving away from cathode ray tube (CRT) computer monitors to more efficient liquid crystal displays (LCD) or light-emitting diode (LED) displays. “In some cases, there may be a more than slight upfront cost, but the energy savings on some of this equipment is quite dramatic,” he says.

Symantec's research revealed that although public sector data managers say energy efficiency is synonymous with green, they are not buying hardware based on a vendor's record for low power consumption. Only fourteen percent of the public sector respondents said energy efficiency was an important criterion for vendor selection versus 30 percent of private sector companies.

The discrepancy between what governments say they believe and what they do in practice, Derrington says, can be attributed to the more rigid guidelines for government procurement. “We have some interesting disconnects in terms of many, many city agencies that may want to be more helpful and may be proactive but very often find themselves in a bureaucratic maze,” Shark says.

If the department responsible for purchasing more efficient equipment is not the same agency that buys the power, then those that buy the equipment ultimately have little stake in achieving long-term energy savings. “That is something we're going to see that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” Shark says. “There's no one governance model. There are cities that don't even have an inventory in any one place of the buildings that they own and manage, and that becomes an issue.”

The green data center

Some data centers are being built with safeguards against bureaucratic confusion included in their blueprints. On Dec. 13, Oregon announced the completion of a multi-year State Data Center (SDC) consolidation project that combined data centers from 11 state agencies into one new building that serves 40,000 state employees.

The project, a collaboration with private vendors such as San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco, cost $43 million and has moved 1,500 servers onto one standard IBM platform and virtualized networks, servers and storage for all state agencies, bureaus and boards. The SDC provides network services not just to the state, but to counties and school districts as well.

Although operational efficiency led the charge to consolidate when the data center idea was on the drawing board in 2002, the rising costs of electricity have bumped energy savings up to the number-one reason for building it. The state was at a crossroads and had to decide whether to embark on significantly upgrading the 11 individual data centers or building a new one.

“A lot of the old data centers were just after-thought computer rooms added into regular office buildings, so they had very significant limitations in cooling capacity and energy-savings capacity,” says SDC Operations Manager Bryan Nealy. “This building from the ground up was designed paying particular attention to all those energy-savings components.”

The building is divided into three areas, with the office space in the front, and the infrastructure, such as generators and chilled water, in the back of the facility. “We built the data center [in the middle], so we're able to focus the high-density cooling and power needs of [it] just to the core where it's needed,” says SDC Administrator Mark Reyer.