How Verizon Does Green Computing

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And, in the past, we've had to say, "Leave your machines on because there are patches coming," or it just became standard practice to leave machines on. Instead, everybody turns their machine off when they leave, and in the middle of the night this product wakes it up, does the patch, and shuts it back down, so it really does minimize the amount of time that computer needs to stay on.

Are your employees good about shutting down their computers? Don't some simply forget?

It's habit. Some people are in the habit of leaving them on. But that's the other great thing about this product—it can go out and shut it off automatically. We've messaged everyone that this new technology does exist, and people are getting better about turning off machines.

If you were to look at your entire energy bill, what percentage comes from lighting, what percent from heating, and what percent from computing?

It's going to vary by location. In a call center, for example, probably 40% of your power is computers, the rest would be heating and lighting. But keep in mind that call centers are a densely packed environment, with a lot of computers.

In an office space, it would be more like 10% computers, and in a data center it would be more like 75%, because you've got a lot of machines and that's the primary draw on the facility. In a data center, the other 25% would be lighting, cooling, and other functions.

Are there any other costs besides the $20 million you already mentioned that you save by being energy-efficient?

The $20 million is on the data center front. In the call centers, we're looking at roughly $60,000 per year off the utility bill per call center. We've got Sun Rays [Sun Microsystems' thin client computers] implemented in three centers today with a couple more happening here in a few months.

As we move forward, we'll be rolling this out to all of our call centers—either the Sun Ray technology or a similar energy-efficient desktop-less environment. If you look across all of our call centers, that translates to over $1 million per year in power savings. Add NightWatchman [software that turns machines on and off remotely] to that—we only have early numbers on NightWatchman that say somewhere around $500,000 per year in savings.

It's unusual as a CIO that you're so aware of energy consumption. Isn't that usually left to another department?

If it's going to affect our bottom line and our customer experience, then we're going to be very involved in it.

Have you investigated any forms of alternative energy?

[Other forms of alternative energy are] really not prime time ready for a data center yet. The other thing we certainly try to do on our network side of the business is to have test-drive vehicles that go out and test our network. We look for those to be as fuel-efficient as possible.

Literally, there's a guy going around saying, "Can you hear me now?"

There are many, in fact, driving a lot of miles throughout the whole country every year. In fact, we drive more miles than any other carrier to make sure our network is better than our competitors'.

In the technology industry, it seems that server makers are really good about getting the most power out of the smallest size, but not as much attention has been paid to energy efficiency until recently. Why is that?

I think that's right. I think for a while the focus was on footprint, and people were adding so many servers because more and more processes and functions are automated.

There's incredible growth, so the typical person running a data center would say, "I don't want to build 10 more data centers, so help me with size." From the late '90s through 2004-05, the focus was on size, shrink the size. And the suppliers did a great job of that.

But, to your point as they shrunk the size, the smaller box would draw even more power than a larger box would have in the past. Total cost of ownership in an environment is most important, in addition to reliability, and as I go to buy from a Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), IBM (IBM), Sun (SUNW), Cisco (CSCO), whomever, those are some of the questions we ask them before we make those decisions.