Green IT Practices
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Did you know…
A typical X86 server will use 65% of power and cooling as specified on the box even while doing nothing!!!
At current operating expense of a X86 server will be more than the purchasing price of the server in 18 months!!!
Maintenance for a single rack of servers cost around $105000 per year on energy costs
Much Ado about nothing?
We recognize that in most companies Green policies are nothing but fluff.
So much has been said about Green IT practices in the recent past. But how much of it is just organizations, especially IT operations paying lip service to going green and how much of it is actually achievable and possible? To answer these questions, we need to consider, especially in these hard economic times, what it means to an organization’s bottom-line. The statistics provided in the above section are just a tip of the iceberg in costs that non-green IT practices cost an organization.
How many times have memos from the senior management or IT on Green practices met with skepticism or ire?
Isn't it time to take action? We can do better!
Continuous Improvement
For purposes of this introductory article on the EITLC on Green IT Practices, we are going to keep it simple and discuss a few important tips in 2 major categories
- Virtualization
- Green Project Management
Virtualization
Not only improved power and energy costs, also control software pricing and licensing costs.
- Server virtualization and desktop virtualization
- Corporate social responsibility
- Unified communications – tightly integrated communications applications – globalization and Green IT
- Video Conferencing – reduce energy costs associated with travel
- Webinars – webmeetings - reduce energy costs associated with travel
- Automate energy usage to optimal levels
- Dynamically move workloads
- Visualize power consumption of resource
- Confluence of facility side(providers like AEP etc) with the infrastructure side
- Blades can be servers, storage, networking, memory, i/o capacity
- Map server growth to energy and cooling required.
Green Project Management
Wondering how you can do your part and make a positive impact on the environment? Consider running a Green Project.
Green Projects are projects that weave green initiatives into the project delivery framework that accomplish two things:
- makes a positive impact on local, regional, and business environment(s)
- makes a positive impact to the bottom line through cost savings.
It just makes sense!The key to getting the most out of running a Green Project is to keep it simple. You can do this on any project, in any size company, in any industry, using any methodology. All it takes is a little leadership, commitment, and common sense.
Green project management helps us all become more accountable, disciplined, and efficient.
Simple Green Project tips:
1. Mandate a paperless project - no printing, no excuses
2. Allow your project team to work one day a week from home - it is 2009, many corporations are advocating telecommute to reduce costs, increase productivity and reduce carbon footprint
3. Reduce the physical space requirements of your project team - big is out, efficiency is in.
4. Reduce office machine usage - face it, most of them don't work that well anyhow
5. Mandate team breaks - take time to sharpen the ax and you will cut deeper and faster
Next Steps
What can we do to implement some of the Green IT practices...
Today
Evaluate web/social software to improve customer/employee relations
Immediate cost and flexibility benefits
In 18 months
Establish a green strategy to support business needs
Long term
Continously explore and evaluate opportunities in cloud computing, social networks and server consolidation and other new approaches to infrastructure
