Towards Leaner,Meaner & Greener IT Setup

Continued from page: 1

Saturday, April 05, 2008

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A few ways to go Green
Once you've done your ROI calculations and a reality check of your IT infrastructure, you need to roll out your Green IT strategy. While there are lots of things that can be done, we'll concentrate on a few relevant ones here.

Replace your CRT monitors with LCD
How many CRT monitors are there in your organization as against LCD monitors? Replacing CRT with LCD is perhaps one of the first few steps to going green, and not without good reason. It is said that a LCD monitor will pay for itself in two years time, just out of the savings it brings in your electricity bills. Since the life of a LCD monitor itself is much longer than two years, this benefit is definitely worth it. Moreover, since the prices of LCD monitors have dropped significantly, it can be considered as a replacement to CRTs much more easily now. Plus of course, it offers so many other benefits, like it occupies lesser table space, causes lesser eye-strain, and emits lower radiation as compared to CRTs. So it definitely makes sense to replace your CRT monitors with LCD monitors.

Interestingly, 38% of the respondents to our survey had already done this activity.

Server virtualization
This is a trend that has really picked up momentum across the IT industry, and is a key technique being touted for going green. Every organization today is combating with the evils of server proliferation, or having too many hardware servers in the data center. There's a server for just about every application-mail, web, proxy, business apps, security, content management, file serving, and so on. The sad part is that their average utilization hovers around 30-40%, if not less. And yet they continue to run 24x7 and consume energy even when they're idle. So, in effect, you're paying the energy cost of servers, which are idle almost 70% of the time. That's not a very pleasant thought indeed, which is why the whole concept of server virtualization has become so popular. It helps combat this very problem.

Virtualization technology allows you to abstract the hardware from the software. So a server, which traditionally runs a single OS and application in the data center, is able to run multiple OSs and apps simultaneously, thanks to virtualization. This would allow you to load a single server with more applications and increase its utilization. This reduces the number of servers in the data center, and also helps you defer your server purchase.

If you find this hard to believe, then what would you say to the 60% of the respondents, who plan to implement server virtualization in the near future as a part of their green IT initiative? Server virtualization topped the charts as far as future plans of going green by our respondents was concerned.

Use renewable energy sources
Why depend upon the standard energy source to power your IT equipment when you can use alternate energy sources like wind, solar power, etc. It might be too expensive to power an entire data center on wind power today, and solar power may not be able to produce sufficient energy for the job. However, you can use solar power for remote areas. In fact, one well known company, Mahindra and Mahindra Financial Services Ltd, has started using solar power to power its computers in remote villages.

Renewable energy sources are gradually gaining importance amongst enterprises. In our survey, we found that 31% of the respondents had plans of using such sources to power their computing needs in the near future.

Disposing Off obsolete IT products
While you might purchase equipment that's green, what would you do with the old or obsolete equipment? Countries like the US are already coping with the problems of e-waste. They're finding it difficult to dispose off their waste IT products. Even Indian companies have begun facing this problem. For instance, according to some preliminary statistics, around 30,000 PCs become obsolete every year in Bangalore alone.

So what do you do with all the IT equipment that's become obsolete? 18% of our respondents had no answer to this question, but actually, there are several options available. It all depends upon the state of your IT equipment, and how much of it do you have to dispose off. If you have lots of it, then it might be better to auction it off. Or, there are many organizations who end up donating their old PCs to schools who can't afford them. In fact, 33% of our respondents said that they hand it over to charity and needy organizations. Another 31% said that they sell it to a scrap dealer, while 19% said they auction it off.

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