Digiweb goes green

Digiweb in Brief

• Privately owned company was launched in 1997
• Digiweb hosts websites, is a domain name manager and provides an online payment gateway
• Company has more than 240 computer servers in a Christchurch data centre serving customers, including government agencies, in both islands
• Spent a five-figure sum to gain CarboNZero accreditation
• Has ongoing plan to convert physical servers to virtual servers to meet a goal of 12 per cent emissions reductions per year

"The owner of the business and the general management team think this is fundamentally good for society."

Ian Falconer, general manager Digiweb

How much carbon does a computer server emit in a year? Christchurch web hosting company Digiweb knows the answer, having recently officially gained carbon-neutral status for its data centre.

"We were the first CarboNZero-accredited data centre in the country," says Digiweb general manager Ian Falconer, after being certified earlier in the year by Landcare Research.

That means the decade-old firm has measured - to the best of its ability - its greenhouse gas emissions, committed to reducing them, and is offsetting its remaining emissions through tree planting.

It has been "quite a piece of work", says Falconer, driven by the desire of Digiweb's owners and management to be environmentally friendly. If it attracts new business to the firm, that will be a nice bonus.

The process involves working out the carbon emissions resulting from all inputs into the business, including suppliers and staff. As a big user of IBMR systems built overseas, there was a fair amount of "guesstimating" the emissions from manufacturing processes, but wherever possible industry benchmarks were used.

"We were able to get to a point after some considerable work of having a snapshot of the average carbon footprint of all the components of our business, even taking into account shipping and air freight."

Guesswork is kept to a minimum by relying on hard data, including invoices, and accreditation is only granted after an independent audit. Once Digiweb had worked out the extent of its carbon footprint, the next stage was to manage it. Electricity consumption and staff-related activities were found to be the firm's two biggest sources of emissions. Of those, electricity accounts for 90 per cent, the single biggest consumer of energy in the business being the data centre.

In one fell swoop, Digiweb was able to eliminate emissions attributable to electricity use by switching to a carbon-neutral supplier. If that sounds easy, Falconer says it's not as simple as it might appear.

"It relies on us forming a pretty close partnership with our supplier and between the two of us figuring out ways to be more energy-efficient. We've got programmes in place to help us deliver that."

CarboNZero status requires an organisation to not just tread water but to commit to reducing carbon emissions. Falconer says Digiweb has a target of cutting emissions 12 per cent in 12 months, a challenge for a business that is growing.

"It's difficult for us because a growing business is going to create more carbon, so we have to look at technology to mitigate that growth."

One way for a large data centre operator to reduce electricity use is to eliminate hardware, and the obvious way to do that is through server virtualisation. Digiweb calculates that each of the company's 240 or so servers is responsible for about a tonne of carbon emissions a year. Converting 10 physical servers into 10 virtual ones on a single machine therefore eliminates several tonnes of carbon.

"While the power consumption typically goes up on that server because of the load, the overall reduction is positive. So we have a fairly aggressive virtualisation programme," Falconer says. Data centre air-conditioning is another heavy draw on power which Digiweb is reviewing.

The business has also cracked down on printing, almost eliminating its paper consumption by switching to electronic invoicing. And the contribution of Digiweb's staff to the firm's carbon footprint isn't being overlooked either.

Falconer says an incentive scheme has been developed to encourage employees to reduce their domestic energy consumption, with the company matching, dollar for dollar, any savings they can demonstrate on their power bills between this year and last.

A shower has also been made available to staff who want to cycle to work, and Falconer says a number are doing so. "It's generated an overall feeling of being part of something bigger, which is a good thing."

Those measures have had a significant impact on Digiweb's carbon emissions, Falconer says, but the challenge then becomes one of maintaining the savings year on year. "I'm not quite sure how we do that - that's next year's problem." One answer under consideration is to rehouse the business in state-of-the-art new premises.

Falconer says earning CarboNZero accreditation has cost Digiweb a five-figure sum and, while it has caught some market attention, that's not the main reason for seeking it. "Part of it is that the owner of the business and the general management team think this is fundamentally good for society."

Key Business Insights

Information technology is generally acknowledged to account for about 2 per cent of global carbon emissions, similar to the emissions of the aviation industry. Yet, says IBM's Andrew Fox, who heads the company's New Zealand systems and technology group, the airline industry is taking more flak on the issue.

IT, however, can expect to increasingly become the focus of efforts to tackle emissions, and that will come down largely to reducing electricity consumption. Server virtualisation provides a ready route to cutting power use, allowing multiple physical servers to be consolidated on to a single machine for far greater energy efficiency .

However, in a website hosting environment such as Digiweb's, migration needs to take place in a way that minimises customer disruption. On the upside, hosted customers can expect greater resilience from modern hardware running multiple virtual servers in mirrored environments.

Another area of potential data centre energy savings is air-conditioning. A small adjustment in temperature could lead to a significant reduction in energy use.

Outside the data centre, switching computers off at night results in big savings, as does putting them in sleep mode rather than enabling screen-savers.

Additional Resources

IBM commissioned the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development to study the role IT infrastructure can play in environmental sustainability. Its report is here:

www.nzbcsd.org.nz

Measure, manage, mitigate and market is the mantra of Landcare Research's CarboNZero accreditation programme for organisations seeking carbon-neutral status:

www.carbonzero.co.nz/about/programme.asp

IBM's Project Big Green is a US$1 billion effort to increase the efficiency of its products and to promote ways of improving data centre efficiency:

www.ibm.com/systems/optimizeit/cost_efficiency/energy_efficiency/

And of course you can visit Digiweb by going here:

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digiweb.co.nz