Green Metrics: Measure By Measure

You can manage what you can measure. You can tame what you can name. However you choose to say it, it's becoming abundantly clear that any efforts to go green must begin with accurate and actionable measurements of energy consumption.Several IT vendors have been busy on this area lately, including IBM, Juniper, Ixia, Enterprise Information Management, and C-Lock Technology.

For its part, IBM, through its $1 billion-a-year investment in Project Big Green, is set to announce several energy-related offerings. They include the ability to combine Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager software and Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management to allow manufacturers to collect energy and power-consumption data from across the organization and determine how energy can more efficiently be consumed. Also in the offing is a new version of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 that will allow organizations to reduce paper consumption by more than 80%.

Enterprise Information Management and C-Lock Technology say they have released a beta version of GreenCert, a software application that allows organizations to measure, verify, and report greenhouse gas emissions with an emphasis on carbon management. The joint project was first disclosed last December. Juniper and Ixia, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Labs, have developed the Energy Consumption Rating (ECR), to help determine the energy efficiency of networking equipment and data centers. Juniper and Ixia compare the ECR to LEED or EnergyStar rating for appliances.

And speaking of measurement, Intel noted this week that since 2000, it has reduced perfluorocompounds (PFC) emissions by 56% in absolute terms and 80% normalized by production volume. By end of 2007, Intel had reduced normalized emissions by 20% below 2004 levels and has set new conservation goals for 2008 to 2012. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave a Green Power Leadership Award to Intel this week, as a result of the chipmaker's multiyear commitment to purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy certificates.