Green Printing

Universities and educational institutions are very guilty for using a lot of paper. Although we cannot completely cut of the use of paper we can find ways and measures to reduce the use of paper and paper waste.  The truth of the matter is that this is one of the easiest ways to adopt a green approach.

Here is a list of ways to be green:

1.    Using recycled paper

2.    Doubled sided printing options

3.    Black and white printing

4.    Use a smaller printing infrastructure to reduce power and paper consumption.

5.    Use network and share printers where possible.

Although Limkokwing is doing a great job to be green when it comes to printing. There is still one way that it is not fully using.

Digital stored documents.

What a lot of lecturers are not doing efficiently is constantly updating material for students to access on the portal. It is making a lot of students print out material, as they are unable to access the information when needed. Like this students will be more organized and will be able to access information any time. This will cut down significantly on the power consumption of the printers and the amount of papers and the amount of printer toners being used.

General Tips for Power Saving in Limkokwing

All the different advancements in green technology are all useful to the overall decrease in power consumption for Limkokwing. But what can we do ourselves as students and lecturers and members of faculty in order to reduce power consumption and ‘BE GREEN’. It is all as simple as turning a light bulb off.

Here are some interesting facts before we dive into the ways we can be more ‘GREEN’.

1.    Typical desktop computers don’t normally use all the power coming into it. Most of it is dissipated and wasted as heat while the rest goes to the processor, memory disks, and other hardware components.

2.    Since computers produce so much heat and with the high demand for all labs to have a computer for all students this means there is a high demand for having air conditioners in all rooms and with out window ventilation like in Limkokwing and the hot weather outside, computers will be much more expensive to run.

3.    Even though you see the computers in the Limkokwing labs running in standby it is not true that the computers are actually doing this. Some of the PCs have this feature disabled.

4.    25% of all electricity consumed is actually used when the devices are actually off.

5.    When left on and idling normal desktop computer consume 85W of power with the monitor turned off. Now if left on for 40 hours during the week instead of 168 hours then you could actually save $40 on a single computer. What sort of saving can be done in Limkokwing?

6.    If a computer is left on for 24 hours a day, you are basically adding 1500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere.

7.    Electricity is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions ahead of transport.

Lets get green:

• The computers in Limkokwing should only be let to run during school hours however after this should be completely switched off. Even at the plug. Because of this Limkokwing can save 810kWh a year and at the same time save 67% during this year.
• Limkokwing should invest in surge protectors that actually stop allowing power to flow in to the computers once it detects that the computers are not on.
• Since a lot of companies are trying to go groan Limkokwing should look into Energy Star Compliant devices and monitors which will normally use less power than normal.

Cloud Computing

What is the next step after having physical hardware on your premises? What can better than desktop and server virtualization? There is one new type of alternative that has become the ‘ talk around the camp fire’.

Cloud computing is the ability of user to be able to access IT resources such as data, software and even control hardware through wireless and LAN networks. What happens is that a user will send a request using a computer with only a high-speed Internet wit minimal hardware resources and very little software, for a word processing program, to a service provider.  Once this request has been seen and accepted the user will be able to run the application and use it to do anything task that he wishes to do and even save the information on the web.

With this efficient way of using applications whilst using minimal hardware to perform tasks, cloud computing becomes a very powerful tool for institutions. IT will effectively allow these institutions to be able to increase and add capabilities on the go with having to spend funds on creating a new infrastructure for their organization, training new employees and one of the most important factors, licensing new software with the amounts of students certain institutions may have. The only real costs that this service could incur are a subscription based pay service that an institution will have to subscribe to using an IP-based login over the Internet.

I feel that this is a great alternative for Limkokwing. IT will significantly reduce costs across a wide range of resources that the university requires for certain faculties such as Creative Multimedia and the Architectural Faculty. Both these faculties require a large amount of powerful workstations and lots of licensed software.

Now if implemented even the issues of storage costs in datacenters will be reduced and the need for more datacenters to accommodate storage of data will be greatly reduced. All the costs can now be done by allowing a third party take care of the data on a secure private cloud server.

With cloud computing, each student is able to, as in desktop virtualization and server virtualization, access all their data from home or one the go with a assigned temporarily login or student ID.

Virtualization Vital in Efficiency in educational Institutions

In the past few decades’ technology has evolved at a staggering rate. It has been almost inevitable that schools and institutes would take upon this advantage to help students learn and excel in their studies. As a result more and more computers have been inserted in classrooms as well as starting IT courses in schools requiring more and more computers. Since this has been so successful students are able to have their own logins and have been able to save their personal study information on the computers. 

Limkokwing has been able to adopt this technique very effectively and even has the ability to be able to allow students to run software on standalone machines in order to learn and further their education.

This is a very positive thing not only for Limkokwing students but it has proven very effective in many institutions and especially in developing countries who are still new to this major advancement in technology and availability of IT resources. But what implications does this impose on Limkokwing. How is this affecting the energy consumption and costs?

How can this be further improved?

Ownership costs, energy consumption, hardware refresh costs and software licensing are major problems that Universities and upcoming institution are facing.  Technology is changing drastically and applications and users are in more demand for better-equipped workstations in order to produce better quality work, especially in a Creativity University like Limkokwing. As a result these workstation will be replaced allowing newer ones to be bought incurring extra cost s on the university. Now the older ones are obsolete and as a result need to be disposed of resulting in waste and pollution, as some materials are not recyclable. Another factor is the amount of energy that is consumed by many workstations. Many workstations consume almost 409W of power when running at 100% and 202W even at rest. This is a big concern when it comes to the electricity bills universities pay. Now that many students are taking on IT degrees as well as degrees in design the number of powerful computers increases as well as a demand for licensed software there are a lot of cost that once again will be incurred on the institute.

Now we have identified the issues that our schools and universities are facing. What is the solution?

Virtualization the process that, the physical characteristics of computing resources are hidden from the way in which users and applications interact with hardware.

Virtualization is very similar to sending a message from your mobile device to shop for products at a low price or a request from a user for directions using GPS. Virtualization can be a very general subject but when applied can be very useful especially in education for use in networks, servers and applications.

Now that we have established the meaning of virtualization how can this be applied to our educational institute?

The first example of this application is in desktop virtualization. This is the process, which the student’s operating system and his desktop application will be hosted on a virtual computer running on a server. IT gives the students a lot of freedom and ability to have their own custom accounts and still be able to use it on different computers within the school.

With this the first biggest advantage is that the cost of software licenses if a workstation were to fail would be cut down, as all applications and software will be run of the server.

The other alternative is server virtualization. What happens is that a single server is partitioned into smaller secure servers that run different applications. Like this the physical hardware needs is cut down as well as the management costs.

Now because of increased usage it is easier to change hardware, so moving a virtual server is as easy as copying a file to the next server.

This for an educational institute such as Limkokwing will be very beneficial as there is reduced power consumption, lower operating costs and greater overall reliability as the replication of the servers is easy and making backups and damage control is very easy.

Because of how beneficial this is Limkokwing should look into a virtual schooling option for the students. IT is very similar to that of K-12 schools in the United States. Research shows that The server virtualization in the K-12 schools ‘gives district IT departments the tools to deliver secure, supportable application severs without software interaction problems.’ Now because of this ‘The lower support costs and higher hardware utilization rates made possible by virtualization enable districts to support more instructional applications at a lower cost.’

Now for Limkokwing purchasing new hardware wont be necessary on a regular basis as older computers or even workstation that use less power can be used to run application that will be run on stronger more powerful servers. With workstations that use less power around 160W a university like Limkokwing will be using around 32000W of power. But now Limkokwing can start using PC’s or thin hardware clients that are using 20W of power totaling 4000W meaning there will be almost a cut of 28000W, which is a huge power consumption cut.

If that is coupled with a server what consumes 4000W its will only reach a total power consumption of 8000W. 

Clearly it can be seen that virtualization is a thing of the future and with the rapid change in hardware more powerful servers can be used with thin hardware clients that consume even less power. If Limkokwing would love to take it into consideration actually have some courses running online and turn to having a sub division of online schooling reducing costs of materials such as paper and facilities so we can accommodate more students. Like this staff and management can give better services to the students with much lower costs with greater security and reliability. 

Green Storage

Since we can look at the aspect of virtualization of desktops and even severs. How can we further reduce the energy consumption of the storage devices on the systems? Normally these storage devices especially hard disks even when idle consume some energy. According to an article in SearchSMBStorage businesses energy is consumed 30% of the time by storage and up to 80% of that storage power is consumed by spinning hard disks, both idle and running.

I have done a little research in which ways Limkokwing, if they take upon virtual computing, can further lower costs with an approach to green storage on the servers and machines that they would run.

When running on servers certain information may be obsolete or may be not necessary for access at that particular moment. During this time the storage devices will be running, as they are active waiting for a command to summon up the information. However this on the long run will inflict huge cots as hard disk are running for no apparent reason when data is not being used. What they could implement is to use certain types of software that management can manage how long information can be held active before it should be archived into separate forms of storage until it is needed. This is a form of Massive Arrays of Idle Hard Disks or MAID. It used to be a very slow process when information had to be summoned as the hard disks were switched off but companies such as Nexsan Technologies have taken a stand in not fully turning the hard disks off but by giving the shortage devices a level of spin-down. This change helps reduce power consumption by 20% at level 1, 60% at level 3 and at the same time boost response time of acquiring information in less that 30s when off.

One good but a little more expensive solution is to move to Solid State Drives. Computer World States ‘Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning there are no moving parts. Because there is no actuator arm and read/write head that must seek out data on a platter like on a hard disk drive (HDD), they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data.’

This already as it is means there is a considerable drop in power consumption not to mention a huge increase in performance as information can be accessed at a quicker rate as read and write rates of SSD’s are considerably fast at 230 MBpS.

Normal hard disks use about 18W of power and in huge servers, which may contain 128 HDs which in total would consume alone 2304W of power while normal SSDs would only consume about 2W of power that would total 256W of power. This is a significant difference that would lower power consumption costs but would be a problem as the cost per gigabyte is high. 

Networking

Limkokwing is a good example of a local area network. The network aspect of green computing relies heavily on reduction of energy consumption using energy efficient Ethernet. At most times the Ethernet transmitter and receiver are operating at full power even when no data is being sent, and this results in large losses of energy. Energy aware standards are being introduced that solve this problem by introducing a low power mode for idle link intervals, this standard is called Energy Efficient Ethernet. The energy savings from this solution rely on the amount of traffic and on the timing of the frame arrivals. This is a technique that can easily be adopted by the University.

Increasing the efficiency of servers helps the clients utilize most of the power therefore reducing wastage.

Data Centers

Limkokwing is slowly growing and needs to start implementing new ways of storing large amounts of student data and records by the use of a data centre. But before Limkokwing can implement this new technology it needs to consider the possible problems and ways which it can reduce the power consumption when using data centers. 


A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components. Data centers consume 1% of the world’s annual energy consumption, this shows that data consume a lot of energy and this means high energy costs for the organization. An efficient data center will improve the operations of the organization in turn bringing in a guaranteed profit. The first step is to identify where the energy is actually being consumed, research shows that most of  the energy in data centers is not going to the servers but to the cooling, fans, lighting and other non productive elements.

Air management is one way to reduce energy costs. The equipment should be arranged in a way that allows cool air to flow into the servers while warm air exits the building. This results in less energy being used for air conditioners as some of the cooling is done naturally. Identify where the spots where high levels of recirculation are, which is hot air from the servers that finds its way into server intakes, and also bypass flow, where cold air returns back to the computer room air conditioner without cooling any servers, thereby wasting energy. Once these spots are identified changes can be made to ensure that their effect is minimal. The changes include providing a high-density heat containment system for the high-density load area. The temperature set point can also be increased by a small amount; this increases the supply temperatures to servers. Also set the fresh air handling unit set point closer to the computer room air conditioner; remove air temperature to save energy. Invest in a cooling system that involves integrated data center wide sensors, intelligent control and automated provisioning, this allows the computing infrastructure to interact with the data center facilities to provide efficient cooling.

Other ways to insure the efficiency of a data center involve, improving cable management within cabinets and clear obstructions below raised floor, his improves air circulation. Use liquid cooled server cabinets , seal gaps within and between cabinets. The energy savings that result form such simple solutions are impeccable.

Computer Systems Architecture

Computer Architecture is the science and art of interconnecting hardware to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals. This is one of the core stages that any organization intending to go green in technology needs to carefully scrutinize in order to achieve their goal.  The idea is not to reduce the computer’s performance but to create a system that functions efficiently, utilizing all the resources available, and that fits the requirements of the organization. The backbone of going green in computer systems is saving energy or minimizing energy consumption. First the materials used to make the systems should be able to be recycled at the end of their tenure. This includes the plastics/ metal used to make the casing and some of the components inside. The school should buy systems from suppliers that offer recycling plans.

The organization should not buy systems that have more specs than they require, as this will be a waste of money and also energy resources as a lot of power will be needed to run a very powerful machine. Using energy efficient processors like the Athlon 64 X2 Dual core will be very beneficial to the energy saving cause. Although the processor costs more than a regular processor, the organization will be able to make their money back through energy savings. There is also the Asus EPU, the world’s first power saving engine, it provides a total system power saving by detecting current PC loadings and intelligently moderating power in real-time. With auto phase switching for components ( which includes CPU, VGA card, memory, chipset, hard drives and CPU cooler/ system fans), the EPU provides the most appropriate power usage via intelligent  acceleration and overclocking, helping save power and energy.

Power aware compilation is a technique used by system architects to produce the most efficiently functioning processors. There are many methods that can be used, and one of them is called windowed register file, this approach provides a larger number of physical registers than allowed by the instruction set encoding. These registers are displayed as a set of windows, and at any point in the execution only one window is active, therefore operand specifies refer to the registers in the active window.

( http://cccp.eecs.umich.edu/research/poweraware.php). Fans contribute a large percentage of power consumption there fore they need to be regulated and controlled. Pulse-width modulation(PMW) is a popular method fan control, it reads the digital temperature censors on each core of the CPU and switches the input voltage between fully on and fully off, depending on the readings.

What is Green Computing?

Green computing is the practice of the design, development, implementation, utilization and disposal of IT infrastructure efficiently and effectively with zero or low impact on the environment at the same time, reducing operating costs. It can also be defined as the responsible use of computers and its related resources. Its goal is to provide society’s needs in ways that do not damage or reduce natural resources. Generally this means creating fully recyclable products, proposing alternative technologies, reducing pollution, and creating center of economic activity around technologies that benefit the environment.   

Our purpose as a group as a team is to propose possible ways in which Limkokwing can become a Green University, these are some of the problems its facing. The computers in the labs are always on even when no one is using them, the amount of papers printed on daily, the number of servers in the data center, reduction of carbon footprint and most importantly the amount of energy consumed.

These are some of the solutions we think might help turn Limkokwing into a Green University. Power-down the CPU and all peripherals during extended periods of dormancy, minimize the use of paper and properly recycle waste paper, introduction of alternative energy sources for computing workstation, networks, data centers and servers.

Our major objective is to turn Limkokwing to an institution that is carbon-free. Doing this would not only reduce costs for Limkokwing but also reduce the amount of carbon dioxide gas produced.  Carbon dioxide gases naturally blanket the Earth and are responsible for its more or less stable temperature also known as global warming. And also to introduce alternative energy sources like the sun, wind or water.