Going Green

An Executive Interview with Hewlett Packard

Ingo Juraske, Vice President, Health & Life Sciences, Hewlett Packard EMEA, tells NGP about the environmental and business benefits of reducing your energy usage.

“By analysing a significant number of data centers, a clear picture of the range of achievable efficiency becomes apparent”
-Ingo Juraske, Hewlett Packard

NGP. Corporate social responsibility and the implementation of strategies can sometimes conflict with the need for energy saving and technical innovation. How should companies address these issues?
Ingo Juraske. By implementing data centre and workplace transformation programs, HP has significantly reduced its energy requirements. This has both a business benefit and environmental benefit, so there is no conflict between HP’s corporate social responsibility policies and energy saving initiatives.

HP addresses CSR and product technical innovation through its Design for Environment (DfE) programme, established in 1992 to ensure the environment is considered at every stage of the product lifecycle. Energy efficiency is one of the programme priorities, and under DfE, printing or PC products are designed to meet the energy label, Energy Star.

From a research and development perspective, HP Labs has the Sustainable IT EcoSystems Lab, which focuses on sustainability and reducing environmental footprints.

NGP. What practical opportunities are currently available for energy reduction through the use of equipment, cooling systems and electrical loads? What are the alternatives?
IJ. The data centre is an area where HP has seen substantial green innovation recently, reflecting the importance that customers place on energy efficiency in the data centre. Dynamic smart cooling solutions in data centres reduce the cost of cooling by 25-40 percent, while reducing CO 2 emissions by intelligently re-tuning the air conditioning output in response to server demand, and thus supporting a higher operating temperature. Additionally, companies are seeking to address the ever-growing complexity and energy demands of their computing environments. By consolidating applications and hardware, and virtualising the remaining systems, they provide a considerably more efficient set up. Combined with intelligent power distribution and efficient architectures such as Blade servers, energy and resource use can be further reduced.

NGP. As the pressures on the data centre industry tighten over the critical issues of power usage and energy efficiency, the need to develop and learn from industry best practice increases. What can be learned from an analysis of statistical data collected from a significant number of data centres utilising green grid energy efficiency measurement techniques?
IJ. By analysing a significant number of data centres, a clear picture of the range of achievable efficiency becomes apparent. This can then be ranked using a scale and gives companies something to judge both their current situation and opportunity. The power usage effectiveness (PUE) measurement that HP developed with The Green Grid and the A merican Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers ( ASHRAE) gives a feel of how efficient the conversion of electricity into computer power is. Additionally, at a lower level, the HP Server efficiency measurement is now being shared with Energy Star and Spec Power.

The new HP Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC) technology helps companies tackle one of the most critical issues in today’s data centre – power and cooling. DSC enables companies to change data centre energy costs from a fixed to a variable cost, significantly increase their IT scaling headroom, and ensure complete confidence that they are running a much more efficient data centre – helping them drive towards a more adaptive infrastructure.

Ingo Juraske leads the Public Sector, Health & Life Sciences ( PSHLS) segment in EMEA for Hewlett Packard. He is responsible for driving profitable growth and customer satisfaction of HP’s PSHLS business, focusing on eGovernment transformation, border security, shared services and digital health solutions, as well as solutions for pharmaceutical industries and life sciences, education and research.