GREENING OF IT
In addition to the ATS project, Highmark is working to reduce electricity consumption in its data center, which earned a "silver" certification for meeting requirements for environmental responsibility from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Once the data center was complete, the company began looking for other ways to green its IT operations. Director of infrastructure Mark Wood zeroed in on electricity consumption.

Green projects make everybody feel swell and make for good public relations, but there are explicit business drivers for these initiatives. Highmark sought LEED certification in the first place because it would help attract more government business, CIO Tabor says. Then there are operational costs. The utility company that the data center draws power from has in place rate caps that are set to expire in 2010, exposing Highmark to as much as a 40% increase in electricity costs. Such numbers tend to focus the mind.

Wood's first step was to measure the data center's actual power consumption. He and his team found the data center's critical power consumption reached 462 kilowatts of electricity every month. With that metric in hand, Wood set a target reduction rate of 10%.

He began with the low-hanging fruit, seeking out decommissioned hardware that wasn't in use but was still drawing power. His team removed about 20 devices. Step two was to accelerate the company's virtualization strategy. Highmark uses VMware to run Windows and Linux applications. It also runs other IBM/Linux applications on IBM's System Z platform. In 2007, the company eliminated 100 servers by creating virtual instances that could run on underutilized servers. Another 80 are expected to go virtual by the end of the year, meaning fewer machines drawing power and requiring cooling.

Wood's initial energy-reduction effort is a success. Critical power usage stands at around 418 kilowatts per month. This reduction is more than a moral victory: It has cut the data center's annual energy bill by $100,000. More important, Tabor says, Highmark can postpone a $12 million data center upgrade because the facility now has spare power capacity to meet its projected growth for the next few years.

Between ATS and its energy-reduction efforts, Highmark is truly indicative of how IT can deliver bottom-line value.