Putting Green IT to Work in Sustainable Business Practices

Putting Green IT to Work in Sustainable Business Practices

By Mark O'Neill

Published May 05, 2010
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/05/05/putting-green-it-work-sustainable-business-practices?page=0%2C0


[Editor's note: This is an excerpt from a new book, Green IT for Sustainable Business Practice, by Mark O’Neill; the excerpt originally appeared on BusinessGreen, and is reprinted with permission.]

An appropriate mantra for any organization committed to green IT should be "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." Organisations should use the green IT program as an ideal opportunity to reduce the amount of legacy IT equipment that is currently installed on their infrastructure.

Replacement of older PCs with energy efficient (Gold EPEAT rating) PCs should be considered, and if this is not financially or logistically viable at least replace any old CRT terminals that are still in use with far more efficient LCD models.

In recent tests, the average energy usage of a traditional 20-inch CRT VGA monitor was sixty three percent higher than a 20-inch wide-screen LCD monitor. Another option for organizations may be to upgrade from a cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) to a light-emitting diode (LED).

Another consideration for organizations is to reduce the number of PCs that exist on their infrastructure by ensuring they only provide one PC per user. In fact, many organizations are implementing PC sharing schemes to reduce the PC estate to less than one PC per user. This initiative is becoming more viable and accepted especially as modern workforces nowadays tend to be more fluid than static and job-sharing schemes become more popular.

Away from the workplace, users are already used to sharing PCs, for example when visiting libraries and internet cafes. It is essential of course that security issues are identified and addressed. Whenever an individual uses a computer, its cookies, browser history and other settings save the information that has been accessed. It is therefore essential that all the files and settings are deleted once the user logs off, and before the next user accesses the machine. To ensure the user's data and files are kept safe a robust password and data access process needs to be implemented.

There are many different ways in which an organization can reuse unwanted, retired or legacy infrastructure. A best practice Asset and Configuration Management process will assist an organization in identifying where assets can be re-assigned and reused. A popular practice is the passing on of unwanted infrastructure to schools or charitable organizations. This is an initiative that organizations may wish to manage themselves or carry out using a specialist third party, for example Computer Aid.

In addition to reusing infrastructure, organizations should also consider recycling the remaining infrastructure that cannot be reused. To enable more effective and efficient recycling, organizations should only source electrical products that are designed so they can be easily disassembled to component level, using universally available tools. The ultimate aim for any organization is to ensure no electronic or electrical waste is disposed of in a landfill site.

1) Virtualization to Support green IT

At its simplest level, virtualization allows you to have two or more computers, running two or more completely different environments, on one piece of hardware. For example, with virtualization you can have two different Operating Systems on one system; alternatively, you could host a MS Windows XP desktop and a MS Windows Vista desktop on one workstation. Virtualization essentially decouples users and applications from the specific hardware characteristics of the systems they use.

2) Data Center Management and Improvement

IT data centers are potentially the largest contributor to an organization's carbon footprint and must become more efficient if organizations are going to reduce their overall environmental impact.


Read more: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/05/05/putting-green-it-work-sustainable-business-practices?page=0%2C0#ixzz0nbOTPwo8

by:By Mark O'Neillhttp://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/05/05/putting-green-it-work-sustainable-business-practices?page=0%2C0

Published May 05, 2010