This is part one of a blog thread on what do you really mean by Green IT?

The buzzword du jour is "Green IT", with everybody out in the marketplace green washing their products to increase sales by latching on to the newly re-discovered environmental fervour. We are on the doorstep of the next era of ecological awareness, where business interest and ecological sustainment are aligned; this is not 1970's hippy ecology, but economically viable ecological sustainability, or Eco 2.0^tm.

What are the pressure points that are driving Eco 2.0? Economics are starting to play a major role, with the soaring costs of energy, penalties for e-waste, carbon credit trading and fiscal reporting moving these items on to the board agendas. Societal and environmental concerns are getting more media attention, and consumers are "voting with their wallets" to pay premiums for green products and services. Political and legal issues are driving politicians and regulators to enact legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions and set standards for IT equipment. Technology is also driving the demand for more and more information accessible through an exploding number of end user devices which creates increased demand for direct and indirect (e.g. battery chargers) energy consumption. How do you make sense out of all of the noise in the marketplace and gain some understanding of what the proper strategy is for your company, your  clients and your market?

Green IT marketing seems to be focused on the Green Data Centre, and making it more effective and efficient. This is a very myopic view of Green IT. The focus should be broadened along two major lines of thought:

• Making IT Green
• Using IT to Green the Enterprise

Data centres consume about 1.5% of the electricity generated in the US each year, and on average are probably the most wasteful, un-optimized, industrial segment, with a maximum average server utilization of between 3-10%. If you take 100 watts of potential energy (coal, gas) at the generation point, about 70% of that is lost during generation or transmission to the data centre. Inefficient data centres then expend almost 50% of the remaining 30% on UPS, cooling and lighting of the data centre. Most companies do not even track the energy spend for the data centres, as the energy bill usually goes to a facility manager, not the CIO. Once the power gets to the servers and storage arrays, half that power is wasted by inefficient power supplies and fans, and then we get to the huge wastage: the underutilized devices themselves. To make matters worse, the applications running on these servers have not been tuned and may not be aligned to deliver business value, so less than 1 watt of useful work gets accomplished for the 100 watts of input energy. In 2008, the soaring energy prices have reached a point where the energy costs now equal the price of the servers over the useful lifetime of the server. The time has come for CIOs and their teams to start addressing these deficiencies in their applications and utilization, and get with their business partners to first understand their current situation, then start addressing the problems in an organized manner.

IT extends outside the data centre, again to areas where the CIO can influence the decision making and impacts on the business and environment. Some examples are setting up the procurement process to specify Energy Star ratings on equipment, having "gold disk" settings that default to energy saving settings, setting printer defaults to two-sided printing, eliminating CRTs and finally intelligently disposing of e-waste to minimize environmental impacts but also potentially benefit communities who may be able to use the equipment.

Source- HP Communities

Follow the rest of these posts below:

• Part 2
• Part 3
  
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9
  

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