Latest / Technology Now / Saving energy to save organizations
Transcript
- Michael Bird: Hello, hello, hello. And a very warm welcome to Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise where we take what's happening in the world around us and explore how it's changing the way organizations are using technology. We your hosts Michael Bird. Aubrey Lovell: And Aubrey Lovell and in this episode we're exploring energy use and how to drop it like it's getting ever more expensive. Michael Bird: Nice. Aubrey Lovell: We'll be looking at why we're being asked to cut our energy usage and what organizations can do about it, especially when it comes to tech. We'll be taking a peek at how efficiencies being developed to deal with the energy crisis today could have lasting effects in the future. And we'll be taking your questions to the expert on sustainability and going green. And of course we'll be looking at the books that are changing the way you, our audience and some of our previous guests see the world. So if you're the kind of person who needs to know why, what's going on in the world matters to your organization, this podcast is for you. And if you're enjoying it, subscribe on your podcast app of choice so you don't miss out. Right. Let's get into the show. Michael Bird: Okay then. Well, here in the UK, the chief executive of the National Grid has warned the country that they could expect power cuts if the cold snaps we've been seeing continue. And energy supplies from Europe aren't maintained. The blame is being placed on interrupted energy supplies due to the Ukraine war causing stockpiling and driving down supply. The category information and communication technology or ICT, including things like data centers, communication networks, and user devices accounted for an estimated four to 6% of global electricity use in 2020. So it's a bit of a no-brainer that any problems with energy supply is an issue that matters to IT. So this week we're joined by John Frey, chief Technologist for sustainable transformation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. John works with some of the largest organizations in the world to develop low carbon solutions to business challenges, share best practices, and drive new business opportunities. John, thank you so much for joining us. John Frey: Yeah, my pleasure to be here. Michael Bird: So I'd love to just dive straight in if that's okay. How much of a real world issue is energy supply to businesses and is there any actual risk or is it just scaremongering at the moment? John Frey: No, it's absolute risk and it's been going on for a long time, by the way. I can recall 15 years ago being in South America talking to a bank that gets their power from hydroelectricity and because of a drought, they were told they have to reduce their consumption by 25%. I was in Cancun last week and we lost power for almost a day. So it's a very real topic across the world. Michael Bird: So we're all being told to tighten our belts. What specific things, maybe you're telling organizations, but what specific things can organizations with large energy drawers do now to save energy and I guess therefore save money? John Frey: Yeah, it's absolutely the time to start looking at how do you consume less, how do we use the efficiency features built in our systems in IT? That's a real challenge. We know that only about 50% of our customers use any automation to manage workloads or power proportionality. So there's lots of opportunities for improvement. Michael Bird: Yeah, I mean, is there anything specific that you can think of? Any off the top of your head, any top tips? John Frey: Yeah, absolutely. So in technology, for example, real estate teams who have historically paid the power bills have really optimized cooling systems in the way the buildings are run. But the technology piece, those technology leaders that often don't even have visibility to the power bill still have a tremendous amount of resiliency and redundancy and that's necessary. But now we need to optimize resiliency and efficiency in mind to really lower that consumption. Michael Bird: So is the way to sort of reduce consumption, is it about buying stuff that is energy efficient? So where organizations are right now, does it feel a little bit like it's too little, too late, you should have invested in this stuff years ago? Or actually, is there stuff that organizations can do without replacing equipment? John Frey: Yeah, so it's actually both. So one of our conversations with customers today is we have designed a tremendous amount of optimization and efficiency features into the equipment they own, use it and take advantage of it. So many customers, for example, turn their power efficiency settings of the hardware off the moment they put the hardware in the infrastructure. So it doesn't even involve buying new equipment yet, although there are certainly benefits to that as well. It's use the efficiency features in the gear, use the automation that will allow you to balance workload versus power consumption and then as you move forward, make sure you're buying more efficient technology with these subsequent tech refresh. Michael Bird: Does being efficient with your technology, does it mean that all your technology is going to be running on the go slow? John Frey: No, no, no. Absolutely not. In fact, we have a term called power proportionality, which is let's have the equipment use only the power that it needs to run the workload and when the workload is lower, have it consume less power when we have more workloads have [inaudible 00:05:25] consume more power. So the equipment's actually very good at throttling itself to be most power efficient. Michael Bird: So is being frugal and efficient, actually beneficial in the long run? Are there any lessons that we can learn today which will then pay dividends in the future? John Frey: Absolutely. In fact, part of the reason we suggest this to companies is because it makes great financial sense. There's significant energy to be saved by using the equipment more efficiently, looking at the amount of equipment in their infrastructure and reducing over provisioning, those are equipment costs, software license costs, maintenance agreement costs that they don't have to pay. It also saves them space, power and cooling and don't miss it from many companies. Their data center, whitespace is the most expensive real estate they own. So when they learn to optimize now that benefits them go forward as they have new technology opportunities. Michael Bird: I think you and I have talked in the past a little bit about being more efficient with the programs that you write or being more efficient with how those programs are coded. Can you just talk to that a little bit? I'd love to just sort of hear a bit more about that. John Frey: Absolutely. A new opportunity that we've realized is out there and we're writing a white paper on this topic this year is software efficiency. And that's both how do you use software applications to optimize your equipment for better power proportionality, but to the point that you ask, it's how do we write more efficient code? It turns out that if we pick more efficient programming languages like C and rust, we can make significant reductions. The academics that have studied this much more than me say we could cut technology's power consumption by 50%, five zero by doing nothing more than rewriting our applications in a more efficient code. So again, we're not suggesting customers go rewrite everything, but if they're going to rewrite the application to make it cloud enabled or for some other reason, do it in a more efficient software language. Michael Bird: Because I guess we're in this world where we have effectively unlimited resources to be able to do what we need for very, very cheap. Whereas I can remember when games, like games that came and [inaudible 00:07:34] just came back. There were stories where they would literally be cramming as much as they can just to fit that game on the cartridge being so efficient with code. So do you think we're going to kind of start to swing back to that where we're just being like, how efficient can we be? How small can we make this program to get the most out of it? John Frey: Yeah, I think we are, and edge devices are a great example of that. If you have a very small device that's capturing data or processing data much like that game cartridge of old, you've got to be super efficient with the code. In fact, I was talking to a software designer on Tuesday at an event we were at and she said, the easy way is to grab from a software library a lot of pre-written code and then just add a couple lines to modify it to do what I need. She said, that's not very efficient, but it's very time efficient. It makes my job go faster. And she said, what I'm having to teach myself now is instead to just write the code I need and optimize that. And she said, my code's much more compact, it runs much quicker and it's much more power efficient. That's called software performance engineering, by the way. And that's another technique that we encourage our customers to take advantage of. Michael Bird: So looking forward, what should organizations think about when they're planning around the energy their tech consumes? John Frey: Yeah, we're asking them to do a couple things. One is implement a sustainable IT strategy. Even the world's most sustainable corporations when we talk to their technology teams and say, how are you thinking about this in relation to your technology? Have a strategy. And by the way, we have a free workbook we offer customers that will walk them through that. Number two is make sure they're going from edge to cloud. So often we focus on the data center that is absolutely the low hanging fruit, but if they're a large company that has a hundred thousand PCs out there and printers around their infrastructure and edge devices, those little pieces all add up and don't miss, we haven't talked about it yet, but all of these power implications also come with carbon implications. So if we can optimize their technology use from a power savings perspective that's got a financial benefit, but a carbon benefit as well. Michael Bird: Okay. John, I could just keep asking you questions, but that is all we have time for right now. Don't go anywhere though and we will drop some useful links about some of the stuff that John talks about in the show notes. We will be right back just after this. Okay. So next is up down. It is not up or down. It is down to you, our audience as we open the floor for you to give us your recommendations on books which have changed the way that you look at the World Life and business in the last 12 months. Now they could be technology based, they could have changed the way you worked or they could have just made you look at the world in a slightly different way. Now if you want to share your recommendations, then there's a link in the podcast description. Just record a voice note on your phone and send it over. Professor Scott Tinker: I'm Scott Tinker, I'm a geologist, by training, but I'm at the University of Texas now, run a very big research unit here, 250 people. And the book that changed my year is a book called Unsettled by Steve Koonin, a physicist and National Academy member. And Steve was under Secretary of Energy under Mr. Obama, but he's really trying to help us all understand the range of climate impacts and the costs and what's driving those. And I don't agree with all of it, but it changed my year in just the way I think about these things. Michael Bird: Okay, thank you. What a brilliant recommendation. John, have you read anything that you can recommend to us recently? John Frey: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, it's a book called A Billion Hours for Good. It's by a friend of mine, Chris Field, and Chris is a guy that said, you know, what if we each committed to dedicate 1% of our time, that's 14 minutes a day to doing something for good. Whether it's working with young people, teaching someone to read, taking some activity on efficiency or climate or whatever it is around the world, how could we change the world with a billion hours for good? So that's the premise of the book. And by the way, Chris also shares from his experiences as a young man, he realized that children were being used in slavery in Ghana. Now he lives half a world away in a little town in Texas and said, but I've got to do something about that. So he started a charity called The Mercy Project that frees kids from slavery in Ghana by teaching the fishermen that use them to pull fish at a little nets, sustainable aquaculture. So as the fishermen can raise their own fish, they don't need the children to pick the fish out of nets. And the agreement is they go help a village raise these fish and then the village agrees to release the kids back to their parents. And so Mercy Project does the reintroduction process. They pay for the kids to go all the way through high school, and now some of them are in college. So it's a great book. I highly recommended it and Chris is just an outstanding guy. Michael Bird: Well, thank you for the book recommendation. So it is time now for some questions from the audience to you, John. Hopefully that's okay. Now you've been sending in your questions to John on the topics of sustainability and green IT, and we've got a couple lined up for you now. So first question, Ariel from Detroit asks, is it realistic for established businesses to truly make the switch to truly sustainable IT or is that just the realm of startups? John Frey: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, our message to anyone we talk to around the world is start where you are. Look for the low hanging opportunities, and in our white papers and in our workbook, we point some of those out. Things like if the customer is over provisioning their cooling using way too much, we put thermal sensors on all of our equipment so the customer can see how hot or cold things are getting, and we know in IT if things get too hot, they fail. So we put way too much cooling in, but we give them all the tools. They already own the tools to solve that challenge. So some things are pretty straightforward. Obviously as you get into designing the next generation of systems, they can make those moves as well. But no, absolutely start where you are and go from there. Michael Bird: Okay, question two is from Connor in Dublin who asks, is it time for a more open approach to what goes on behind the scenes in cloud storage? I'd love my company to make more sustainable choices, but I hear a lot of buzzwords and often not a lot of evidence that my data will definitely be held in a sustainable way. John Frey: Yeah, it's absolutely. Transparency is key on all of these topics. And in fact, it's not just transparency, but it's also how do we use the same terminology and mean the same things? So you see lots of claims out in the cloud industry and in the tech industry about carbon neutrality and net zero, but yet when you actually dig into what those companies mean, they mean completely different things. So HPE for example, has one of the first two science-based target initiative approved net zero goals. And what that really means is the third party said, absolutely, if you do that, that's going going to keep us on track to meet all of the one and a half degrees scenarios. And what that means for us, by the way, is rather than emitting this much and then offsetting this much, we have to reduce our emissions by 90% and then negate the rest. That's significant. So yeah, it's time for the transparency and the only way that we all come together and bring technology to a higher level of sustainability is through that transparency, through that disclosure, and we have a long way to go yet in the industry. Michael Bird: Awesome. Thank you, John. And again, we'll drop a couple of links in the podcast description for more on these topics. Right then we are getting towards the end of the show, which means it is time for this week in history. Aubrey Lovell: This week in history. Michael Bird: Aubrey, nice. Aubrey Lovell: Was that good? Did you like that? Michael Bird: Yeah, you really sort of hit the high notes there. Aubrey Lovell: I'm going to definitely keep working on it. Michael Bird: Please. Which is a look at the monumental events in the world of business and technology, which has changed our lives. What have you got this week, Aubrey? Aubrey Lovell: So the clue from last week was R-O-Y-G-B-I-V. [inaudible 00:16:04] try to say that 10 times fast. Michael Bird: Really, awesome. Yeah. Aubrey Lovell: Michael, do you know it? Michael Bird: I think I do. Is it red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet? [inaudible 00:16:21] the colors of the rainbow? Is that it? Aubrey Lovell: [inaudible 00:16:23] very nice. It's actually coincides with the release of the RCA CT-100. The first color TV, all the way back in 1954. And for the AV geeks among us, it had 525 scan lines, which is what we now call standard definition in the Americas in Japan with FM for the sound, which was pretty fancy for its time, it cost a thousand dollars, which is roughly around $10,000 today. So for that, you got a 15 inch screen and a rather charming wooden case, and they definitely don't make them like they used to. So next week we are talking www dot, I think that's pretty easy, but still, if you know the answer, keep it to yourself. Michael Bird: So that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week, next week we'll be discussing discrimination in AI with professor of responsible AI Anjana Susarla from the Michigan State University. Do send your questions in on responsible AI and business using the link in the podcast description below. And do you keep those suggestions coming in for books that have changed your year? There's a link in the podcast description for that one too. Aubrey Lovell: Until then, thank you so much to our guest, John Frey. Thanks, John, and thank you all so much for listening. Technology Now is hosted by Michael Bird and myself, Aubrey Lovell. This episode was produced by [inaudible 00:17:44] and Zoe Anderson with production support from Harry Morton, Alicia Kempson, Allison Paisley, Alex Podmore, and Ed Anderson. Technology Now is a lower street production for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. We'll see you next week. Cheers.