How to Make Your IT Greener
Our post last month pointing out that servers guzzle as much energy as SUVs got a big response, but many readers asked a very reasonable question: businesses can't be expected to get rid of their IT, so how can they reduce IT energy expenditures?
As we pointed out at the the time, a recent report from British non-profit, Global Action Plan's, entitled "An Inefficient Truth" provided case studies to help guide businesses to save money (and the environment) by being smarter about energy and IT. This month, however, the Kiplinger Business Resource Center is boiling it down to four areas companies should look at to slash the energy used by their IT operations. The report reminds us that,
While there are certainly environmental benefits to reducing energy usage, don't underestimate the financial and logistical challenge this can pose to your business. "Reducing energy use clearly is about more than being environmentally responsible," writes Bruce Naegel, a manager of Symantec's data center management group in this month's GreenTips column from GreenerComputing. "To ensure their long-term viability, organizations must begin now to find and implement solutions that help decrease power consumption" in their data centers and IT operations. Naegel outlines four areas to concentrate on to slash energy usage and delay the need to add new heating, cooling and storage capacity:
- Redundant preservation of data in backups.
- Increasing efficiency of servers.
- Power management through centralized software.
- Careful, creative design or redesign of the physical space housing data centers.