Patrick Penfield recalls the days in manufacturing when servers were so large that one server occupied an entire room. Now Penfield, who spent more than 15 years working in supply chain management for companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Philips Electronics before becoming an assistant professor of supply chain management in Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, marvels at the "miniaturization of equipment" that has taken place.
"Nowadays you can get a server that looks like a personal computer," Penfield says. "It's amazing how much less energy they use while providing so much more functionality than the equipment of the past."
Penfield, whose research focus is the green supply chain, asserts that the availability of smaller, more energy-efficient IT hardware presents "a big opportunity for a lot of companies" to upgrade to newer equipment that can deliver an ROI in short order based on the energy savings.
"A lot of the servers and computers are using 50% less energy than previous generations of servers and computers," Penfield says.
As an example, Penfield points to his own campus. Earlier this year, Syracuse University, New York state and IBM entered into a pact to build a $12.4 million, 6,000-square-foot data center that the entities claim will be one of the greenest data centers in operation.
Among its green attributes, the data center will be able to run completely off the grid, thanks to an on-site electrical tri-generation system that will use natural gas-fueled microturbine engines to generate the electricity and cool the servers. All told, the data center is expected to use half as much energy as a typical data center, according to IBM and Syracuse.
A manufacturer doesn't need to build its own multimillion-dollar green data center to reduce the carbon footprint of its IT infrastructure. Green co-location data centers can accomplish that goal for manufacturers at a fraction of the cost, says Bill Stuckert, vice president of the IT Services Division of Peoria, Ill.-based Advanced Technology Services (ATS) Inc.
"There really is no comparison" in terms of cost, Stuckert asserts.
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