Let’s Talk about Green IT
For most, the real motivation for going green is about the cost and availability of power. Ted Samson said on his Sustainable IT blog that there are four reasons to go green:
- Save money
- Reduce the impact of an imminent energy crisis
- Garner good green PR
- Help the environment
Helping the environment is nice, but would businesses and shareholders care as much about the environment if power was cheap and abundant?
Greening IT is a noble social cause and we should devote efforts toward it. Being green isn’t new. IT has had the chance to be green for a long time. Think about it. Overprovisioning hardware, printing tomes of reports and leaving PCs on at night were par for the course in most IT departments and the business.
When you stand at the edge of a landfill, do you see waste or recycling potential? What do we see when we look inside our data centers? Do we see recycling potential?
How much power is being wasted keeping data around that we will never use again? It is far too easy to be wasteful in IT. We do it without even realizing it. However, there has never been a need to worry about being green in IT – no outside pressure, no mandates, no accountability. Now that’s changing.
Economics is the primary driver for a greener IT and I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. We like the side-effect of preserving the environment, but let’s be honest.
In IT, if we really want to, we can do a lot more.
Take a moment and read a paper from a colleague of mine – Ron Potter – titled “Shades of Green: Which will your organization choose?”
We can make a big difference.
RSS Feed
I recommend reading the latest book from Thomas Friedman, “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” It is really an eye-opener about the potential perilous state of the world’s environment and the major contributors. His thesis is that it is going to take BIG GREEN initiatives on a world-wide scale to slow, stop and reverse the damage we are doing to the climate around the world.
There are plenty ‘low hanging fruit’ that we can focus on now to keep the momentum moving forward with BIG GREEN initiativies. Here’s one…Data Centers. I’ve recently come across some energy efficiency statistics that blow my mind about data centers servers. These statistics are very eye opening and really point to one ‘low hanging fruit’ that the IT industry can and is working on.
Statistics from Sun Microsystems: “For each 1,000 watts of electricity generated, only 450 watts is delivered to servers in the data center. Of this, 67 watts is used to run server workloads…an overall energy efficiency of 7%.”
Here’s another great stat: “A single server is responsible for the same amount of CO-2 as the typical automobile driven for a year. The cumulative impact of data centers alone is huge…37MM metric tonnes per year in the US alone of CO-2 is generated by data centers.” WOW!!! Talk about ‘low hanging fruit’ to keep BIG GREEN momentum moving forward!
The other aspect of BIG GREEN for data centers is the other GREEN…GREEN MONEY! With a concerted, industry-wide focus on energy efficiency, the data centers not only contribute to BIG GREEN, but significantly improve their economic health as well. Investing in more energy efficient computing platforms, management tools to help IT professionals capture more computing horsepower for each IT workload, and using green-sourced energy will help them improve their bottom line as well. Reducing rack space, power and cooling requirements for data centers will have a massive positive impact on CO-2 emission AND help IT organizations become more economically competitive during this crisis.