IT and the Environment

The Office of the Vice Provost for Information Technology (IT) understands that instructional and informational technologies must be implemented and maintained wisely with regard to their impact on our environment. Several plans for resource conservation in current and proposed IT initiatives include sustainability components.

Lab and Classroom Computers

The IT department, being conscious of both the need to save energy and participate in achieving solutions to global problems, has implemented several initiatives and has other under development. Current initiatives include programming projectors to go to sleep after 90 minutes of inactivity, and participation in the promotion of the World Community Grid, where spare processing cycles of unused computers in Rice’s labs are used for solving global problems. Initiatives under consideration include the use of recycled papers and duplex printing (both sides of the page), programmed sleep mode at night for smart classroom computers, and more efficient power paths for classroom infrastructure.

Servers and Storage

We purchase servers that have lower power requirements in their processors (AMD vs Intel). As part of the data center migration, we have consolidated many servers by using virtual machines, where we are able to use 1 physical machine where 3 to 6 were used before. We also have removed over 100 machines from our data center due to efficiencies in the newer more power-efficient machines.

Data Center

As part of our construction of the new Rice data center, we employed the following set of practices for energy efficiency.

  1. Used a carefully designed hot-isle, cold-isle rack layout.
  2. Eliminated nearly every single possible underfloor air obstruction from the design.
  3. Used a 4 ft. raised floor to further reduce air turbulence and improve efficiency.
  4. Eliminated floor penetrations for cables. The only floor openings are to provide cooling for systems (i.e. no wasted airflow).
  5. Maintain a reasonable ambient air temperature (i.e. not a meat locker).
  6. Use appropriate perforated tiles to achieve correct airflow in correct places.
  7. Chillers can load and unload to meet cooling needs (i.e. chillers don't run at 100% all of the time).
  8. We have new UPS systems which are more efficient than older ones.
  9. We have very few power conversions. Each is a source of heat and power loss:
    • Once in the outdoor transformers (utility to 480 volt)
    • Once inside the building (480 to 208)
    • Once at system level (208 to 12 volt DC)
  10. Server virtualization - many of our servers replaced 2 or more physical servers.
  11. We are in the process of moving servers from ill-equipped, poorly designed pseudo-data centers to the new data center, reducing inefficient usage of cooling and power distribution in campus buildings that were not suited to support such use.
  12. Painted the building green.

New Green College

In general, the Cisco equipment that we use for RiceNet2 isn't low-power. We have power supplies that can consume upwards of 4,000 watts per chassis. However, this should be kept in context. Delivering the same amount of bandwidth and capacity with smaller units (stackables) would likely consume more since there are more power supplies involved and more AC to DC conversions (heat loss and power loss). Also, the equipment has variable power supplies. They only use the load that they need.

Since we have 10X the capacity, when you do the math vs the old equipment, the load is lower per Gigabyte.

For just a little bit more power consumption, we get a tremendous boost in performance.

IT Communications

  • IT Update - Went from paper to electronic format – Fall 2005
  • Communications with students – went to email starting in Spring 2006
    • after students indicated that was the best format in the 2006 IT survey.