GreenIT Mission to Japan

Travelling to Tokyo I hoped the weather would be kind enough to allow me a glimpse of Mt Fuji, unfortunately it was not to be this time due to quite unsettled weather that eventually turned into a typhoon.

Still I got to see two other things I've always wanted to see, one was inside the heart of a high-tech Japanese business and the other was an advanced Japanese robot.

Perhaps not surprisingly one of these met my expectations and the other was a major anti-climax.

The Japanese high-tech business presents very much the appearance one would expect, at least from the perspective of a visitor.

We met with some of the largest names in consumer and industrial engineering such as Panasonic, Hitachi, NEC, Fujitsu and then other deeply engineering driven organisations such as NTT, Tokyo Institute of Technology and IDC Frontier.

Being on a UK Green IT mission organised by the British Embassy in Japan we also met with representatives from METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) who have started their own Green IT Promotions Council to tackle IT's contribution to and role in CO2 emissions.

The Green IT promotions council have coined a typically Japanese term to explain the role of IT in carbon emissions. They are 'of IT' and 'by IT'. This refers to the emissions 'of IT' and the emission reductions enabled 'by IT' or by the use of IT when expanded out to consider the full impact.

I was pleased to see that the Japanese were already talking about IT in context, not just as a target vertical to slap a reduction target on without much thought for the consequences.

There is a real recognition in Japan that IT has a major role to play in reducing emissions in other sectors, many of which have a much bigger impact on our environment.

From a data centre perspective I didn't see much that surprised me other than they seem to be a little behind the EU and US in terms of designing in energy efficiency. There is a very conservative approach in their engineering community.

One interesting exception to this was high-voltage DC. The Japanese are leading the way in the development of HVDC power systems, cables, distribution, connector standards and everything else required for data centres to move to 400V DC. Not surprisingly it seems to be NTT (the national telco) leading the charge and we saw working systems that took rectified 400V from the utility and fed it all the way through to the PSU's of their servers.

They seem to have overcome many of the issues, my fear though is that the rest of the world fails to take advantage of this and insists on heading off down their own path of different standards for difference sake.

NTT claim they will have a number of fully operational IT data centres running on full HVDC by the middle of next year, which will finally deliver some real evidence in the debate over AC versus DC power in the data centre.