Mat Smith Services

Modern schools with high expectations face a difficult decision regarding sourcing their IT.

On the one hand, it’s almost impossible to find people who are passionate, energetic, and expert enough to provide your staff and students with what they need.

On the other hand, you don’t want to entrust this job to contractors.

And if you do have the budget to employ exceptional support or installation companies, you’ll likely be supplied with a call-centre run according to SLAs (service level agreements) rather than according to your staff’s needs. And peopled with various technical staff with ‘skill levels’ rather than a face your staff can get to know and like.

In-house technical expertise is hard to come by, let alone expensive. The reason for this is that individuals of a high technical calibre are invariably attracted to business which, regardless of the current economic downturn, still provides a far more competitive salary and more exciting employment prospects.

Secondary schools’ technical needs may easily match or exceed those of a small to medium sized enterprise (SME) employing a number of high-calibre technical individuals – yet many schools continue to employ on a lower level.

But even in the business sector it’s rare to find individuals with great expertiseacross the broad range or disciplines: security, server work, desktop support, databases, communication services, network and LAN infrastructure, wireless technologies; the most successful IT departments employ numerous staff to cover these in-depth knowledge areas.

No wonder it’s so difficult to recruit in this sector!

Because the majority of recruitment in the state education sector is operated in-house, some schools not opting for the assistance of recruitment specialistsappoint staff mainly on the basis of suitability of personality for a role rather than taking adequate account of technical capabilities as well. Without a suitable understanding of the full scope of a job’s requirements and a failure to ask enough of the right questions at interview, this personality-led employment can lead to a fundamentally positive workforce, but not necessarily a boundary-breaking one.

On the upside, in recent years the total cost of ownership (TCO) of servers and networking has decreased dramatically. This means that once servers, networking systems and computing environments are set-up well, and tailored to the organisation in consultation with staff (and that is the difficult part), they can be made extremely reliable and will provide high-availability with relatively little intervention. In simple terms: computers can be more reliable and crash less. With a forward-looking approach to staff training, a sensible technician recruitment strategy, and a reliable and reasonable source of high-end support when you need to make “that call”, modern server infrastructures may be left in the hands of less technically qualified staff. This is made possible in part by new developments in the area of virtualisation, resource clustering, storage area networks, and new operating system technology; specifically by the tiered permissions model found in popular Enterprise virtualisation systems.

It’s all within the reach of most state primary and secondary schools, but the key to success is identifying personnel who can do all of the above: consult, manage projects, implement the systems, provide tailored training and documentationfor your technicians or system managers, hand-over management, and provide less-frequent high-end support. Or just be on-call.

And so if you have to do the inevitable, and outsource the high-end of your technical requirements, strong schools choose a competent adviser rather than a support service. Whereas support engineers will seek to maintain a system in its current state, mostly requiring ongoing contracts (and with little eye on the future), consultants will develop systems, provide solutions, and give management advice, with the specific objective of doing themselves out of a job.

The immediate benefits of green computing are clear to large corporations, but less so to schools.

An organisation with a high number of computing or networking devices can justify conducting research into ways to make their computing green. A company with huge server facilities with a high power consumption price tag may look to find out exactly how those facilities consume power, and take steps to reduce consumption accordingly.

For example, a data center responsible for holding an enormous amount of user data accessible across many sites may choose to swap-out hard disks in their storage arrays with greener models. New ‘green’ hard drives, such as the onemanufactured by Western Digital, are known to reduce power consumption by up to 40%¹, and recent research indicates the cost benefit of replacing drives with new green drives is approximately $10 per computer per year. Whilst £5 or £6 may seem very little to the average home user, the cost-saving implications for large enterprises with thousands of hard drives running 24/7 are clear.

This example is a small fraction of a big colourful picture that comprisescomponent recycling, the extension of equipment life-cycle, server hardware consolidation, virtualisation, secure disposal, intelligent power schemes built-in to new systems - the list goes on. See below for some more information about these aspects of going green.

Many speculate that the true immediate gain in ‘going green’ in the business sector is CSR: corporate social responsibility. It’s hard to refute at this point; the price of a green drive may well not offset the potential cost benefit savings, but if a company can claim they have taken proactive steps to ‘go green’, then they are contributing towards driving down the price of these green drives. And although this reduction in the electricity bill may not fully offset the increased price of green drives for the company, it works wonders for their marketing.

Of course, schools are different.

Schools generally have a different take on corporate social responsibility. Theirs is arguably less cynical, because it matters more to teach students the importance of CSR and related issues than to use it to benefit their own marketing. And so it’s not quite enough to just ensure your ICT technicians know how to recycle printer cartridges and dispose of computers, screens, and batteries properly. (Although this is a start!)

This said, it won’t be long before primary and secondary schools are judged on their green credentials. A recent benchmark standard has been introduced by theGreen League, and a league table of University’s green credentials is now published in the Times Higher Education Supplement. For relevant THES articles, see hereand here.

The recommended approach - the first step in your battleplan to ‘go green’ – may be to identify and separate two subject areas:

1. The disposal and recycling of equipment (end-of-life)
2. Continuous Green Computing (pre end-of-life)

This way, the recycling of computers, display screens, computer peripherals, consumables, and networking equipment can take place according to the school’s wider recycling policy, which may be governed by any schemes run by the school such as Eco-Schools. Alternatively, the school may operate its own policy for the teaching and implementation of equipment recycling, according to the WEEE andRoHS directives. There are plenty of resources available, and some are listed at the end of this article.

This leaves Continuous Green Computing, a term which covers how computers are run before the end of their operational lives. At the time of writing, there are no specific regulations that govern how schools are to run their computers before their end of life other than those regulations imposed on manufacturers. Nor is there firm consensus of the definition of green computing, however why not take a look at the following important principles?

Basic principles of Continuous Green Computing (pre end-of-life)

1. Audit. A carefully designed audit of your existing computing can draw attention to numerous ways to save money, as well as reducing your carbon footprint, which in this case is measured solely on the basis of energy consumption. Usually, the most cost-effective audit for schools is designed by a consultant, and carried-out by the school’s in-house technical staff, in cooperation with teachers, departmental technicians, and other support staff.
2. Understand ACPI. Your school can already run greener without the need for extra investment. It’s highly likely your computers are already equipped with the necessary technology, whatsmore they probably aren’t configured to use it! A good understanding of ACPI can immediately reduce electricity bills. More importantly, combined with other tools, a carefully designed, centrally maintained ACPI policy that governs all of your computers can benefit your school in other ways, such as the extended lifetime of computer equipment and faster computer startup times saving valuable time in lessons.
3. Continuous Green Computing isn’t just about saving electricity bills. Devise a uniform life-cycle management plan across all teaching departments, and stick to it. Sustainable investment in ICT is of key importance when aiming to go green; this principle is generally misunderstood. Life-cycle management in itself can address deeper management and investment issues, such asmaximising return on investment (ROI) which ensures your school is spending wisely, and monitoring utilisation of computing which ensures your school is making the best of what you already have. Once schools have good life-cycle management in place – a process that can take a number of years and requiring support from key school staff, especially in the area of sustainable departmental budgets – schools may address the more subtle questions that concern extending the life of a single computer or suite of computers. What could be greener?

Some ideas for further thought

1. Open-minded procurement process. The tender process of most primary and secondary state schools is set by the local education authority, and standard practice is to obtain three quotations then choose the most suitable and cost-effective one. In most cases it’s possible to simply choose the cheapest, unless there’s a decision to be made about quality of service, aftersales, or value-added. Why not investigate if your LEA / LA will pay the difference for greener equipment? Perhaps they offer a grant for green computing that you are unaware of? Maybe your school could lead the way, and bring about this change?
2. When you come to invest in new servers or networking, consider dense computing, that is, fitting more computing power into a smaller space. The leading solutions for dense server computing are the HP Blade System, IBM Blade Center, and the newly redesigned Dell Poweredge Blade Servers. A good technical consultant is able to provide advice on dense computing and its benefits, and get you up and running.
3. Another technology well within the reach of primary and secondary state schools is virtualisation. Server virtualisation comes in two flavours: free, and enterprise.
   • Primary schools wishing to purchase a new server should consider using free virtualisation technologies, primarily because this can minimise installation costs, and maximise ease of maintenance.
   • Secondary schools wishing to invest in their infrastructure should consider enterprise virtualisation as this can dramatically reduce system management costs, and allow schools to reassess the roles of technical personnel to better suit teaching needs. Enterprise virtualisation also provides the necessary framework to be able to guarantee no downtime for your network.

   In both cases, virtualisation reduces the number of necessary server computers, and when combined with dense computing which can also cut power consumption of a given server, there are significant gains to be had for green computing.

Why not get in touch to discuss how your school can benefit from greener computing, or how a consultant can help to implement any of the above ideas?

Some useful resources for schools

Please check back for a growing list of useful web resources:

• The WEEE man - invaluable resource for teaching the effects of recycling electrical waste: www.weeeman.org
• WEEE directive - an EU directive designed to place the onus of responsibility for safe disposal onto hardware manufacturers, however schools have a responsibility to conform too. See this article to learn about your responsibility as a school. Although the article refers to business, it is also relevant to schools.
• Energy Star - although the website is not of specific use to schools, it’s worth being aware that Energy Star, led by the US Environmental Protection Agency, defines many global green computing standards.
• BBC Green - information about recycling computers
• Google’s Green Computing website - find out how the world’s most efficient data centres are run. A very good read.