Wednesday, June 17, 2009

You mentioned GREEN was important...but HOW important??

The article I found discusses what a company’s five quickest returns are when it comes to going green. According to this article many companies talk a lot but when it comes to actually carrying through with going “green” many are holding off. In a May 2007 survey 87% of companies said that they believe environmental concerns are important when considering IT operations however only ¼ of these companies have actually implemented the criteria into the written purchasing process. So what exactly are these five quickest returns?

Well according to this article consolidation and virtualizing operations are the most well recognized strategies of the past few years. Sun Microsystems is among those companies that had consolidated and by doing so they relocated and consolidated a 200,000 square foot data center into 72,000 square feet and eliminated the use of 5,000 electronic devices reducing the energy requirements by almost 1.5 megawatts. This is helping Sun Microsystems save nearly $1.5 million per year.

The next ROI discussed in this article is the idea of measuring energy use in order to optimize the output. In order to collect the data needed to measure the optimal amount of energy needed for companies to run a group of over 150 businesses called the “Green Grid” have been working together to measure the PUE(power usage effectiveness) of specific equipment along with creating a DCiE(data center infrastructure efficiency) metric in order to measure data center productivity. These measurements will be used by the EPA(environmental protection agency) to develop its newest benchmark which will help give companies the best ROI(return on investment). Using supplemental cooling units has also been a large help when it comes to lowering energy use and cutting costs. By having machines face each other and creating a contained environment in which the heat of the machines is cased companies have been able to apply the cooling unit directly to the area where the heat is coming from and therefore allowing the number of units used to be cut significantly as well as become up to 30% more efficient.

This article continues to talk about how looking for rebates and incentives from suppliers is a way to cut down on costs, especially when it comes to going green and looking for “greener” supplies. If you keep an eye out you are more likely to be able to find cheaper prices for the equipment you and your company need to be more efficient. Finally the fifth quickest return on your green investment mentioned in this article is data deduplication. This is the use of algorithms to drastically reduce the amount of storage space your company is using and that which your company needs. The article does note that it depends on the kind of information you are looking to compress but says that this process of deduplication can allow a compression rate of between 3:1 and 10:1.

So with all of these ways to go green with your company my number one question is why are only ¼ of the said companies mentioned at the beginning of the article actually following through? Who knows…after reading this article these all seem like quite reasonable ways to gather a fantastic ROI…don’t you? http://www.cio.com

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