IT and the Environment

The Office of the Vice Provost for Information Technology (IT) understands that instructional and informational technologies must be implemented and maintained wisely with regard to their impact on our environment. The IT department, being conscious of both the need to save energy and participate in achieving solutions to global problems, has implemented several initiatives and considers conservation for projects under development. Below are several examples of projects with a conservation focus.

Lab and Classroom Computers

Current initiatives include programming projectors to go to sleep after 90 minutes of inactivity, and participation in the promotion of the World Community Grid, where spare processing cycles of unused computers in Rice’s labs are used for solving global problems. As labs and classrooms are updated and equipment replaced, other initiatives and conservation practices are implemented, such as how to more efficiently use power.  Another example is duplex printers are replacing older printers that could only print on one side of paper.

Servers and Storage

We purchase servers that have lower power requirements in their processors (AMD vs Intel). During the data center migration, we consolidated many servers by using virtual machines, where we are able to use one physical machine where three to six were used before. We also removed over 100 machines from our data center due to efficiencies in the newer more power-efficient machines.

Data Center

• As part of our construction of the new Rice data center, we employed the following set of practices for energy efficiency.
• Used a carefully designed hot-isle, cold-isle rack layout.
• Eliminated nearly every single possible underfloor air obstruction from the design.
• Used a four-foot raised floor to further reduce air turbulence and improve efficiency.
• Eliminated floor penetrations for cables. The only floor openings are to provide cooling for systems (i.e. no wasted airflow).
• Maintain a reasonable ambient air temperature.
• Use appropriate perforated tiles to achieve correct airflow in correct places.
• Chillers can load and unload to meet cooling needs (i.e. chillers don't run at 100% all of the time).
• We have new UPS systems which are more efficient than older ones.
• We have very few power conversions. Each is a source of heat and power loss:
• Once in the outdoor transformers (utility to 480 volt)
• Once inside the building (480 to 208)
• Once at system level (208 to 12 volt DC)
• Server virtualization - many of our servers replaced 2 or more physical servers.
• We moved servers from ill-equipped, poorly designed pseudo-data centers to the new data center, reducing inefficient usage of cooling and power distribution in campus buildings that were not suited to support such use.
• Painted the building green. 
  

New Green College

When adding a new college (or building) to the campus network,  consideration is giving to the equipment. In general, the Cisco equipment that used for the Rice network isn't low-power. Power supplies  can consume upwards of 4,000 watts per chassis. However, this should be kept in context. Delivering the same amount of bandwidth and capacity with smaller units (stackables) would likely consume more since there are more power supplies involved and more AC to DC conversions (heat loss and power loss). Also, the equipment has variable power supplies. They only use the load that they need. Since we have 10X the capacity, when you do the math vs the old equipment, the load is lower per Gigabyte. For just a little bit more power consumption, we get a tremendous boost in performance.

IT Communications

• "IT Update" - Went from paper to electronic format – Fall 2005
• Communications with students – went to email starting in Spring 2006 after students indicated that was the best format in the 2006 IT survey.