Ideas for designing a "Green" IT Dept...

any one have any ideas or best practices they have heard or implemented themselves? its the new buzz word and if you can design and run a "green" IT dept you'll have a leg up on your competition.... all i know about is Virtualization... what other "green" technologies can be incorporated into IT?

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GAngel

low power output servers and desktops when you're replacing older models.

IT itself constantly goes "greener".

tdean

yeah, thin clients are gonna get bigger and bigger.... or should i say, become more widely used.

at my last job, people were printing hundreds of docs weekely that was being send inter company mail. i replaced that with a program called "Snag-It" that allowed them to take screen shots of certain things and email them to the person rather than sending via paper.

what about the physical aspects of the datacenters themselves? anyone do anything with AC, power etc?

Bl8ckr0uter

tdean wrote: »

yeah, thin clients are gonna get bigger and bigger.... or should i say, become more widely used.

at my last job, people were printing hundreds of docs weekely that was being send inter company mail. i replaced that with a program called "Snag-It" that allowed them to take screen shots of certain things and email them to the person rather than sending via paper.

what about the physical aspects of the datacenters themselves? anyone do anything with AC, power etc?

Snag-it is the sh1t. It is great for making trainings and helping end users.

eMeS

ISO 14001:2004 - Environmental management systems -- Requirements with guidance for use

Despite all of the hype, "virtualization" really doesn't meet the many of the criteria for what makes a technology "green". (Those criteria are: Sustainability, Cradle to Cradle, Source Reduction, Innovation, Viability).

It's possible to be heavily virtualized and still inefficiently use what you have. What is green is efficiently using the resources you have, whether virtualized or not.

MS

Kaminsky

The idea of "green" is that you should recycle the same amount that you use in power, waste and everything else. If your company sells things in cardboard boxes, the amount of tonnage of cardboard and foam packaging you buy to package your goods and send off to your customers (as well as the contents of your boxes and everything it took to make that product), you must somehow recycle the same amount of tonnage to equal that so you end up with a zero carbon footprint.

I work in a large data centre with many, many hosted services that are usually thin client accessed. The amount of power we draw is akin to the power used by a city of about 350,000 people. However, that is something our company has to offset. Not the client.

Obviously, there is no way in reality that you can recycle the same amount you consume. Especially not in larger companies. SO....... what these companies have to do to meet their accreditation, is get forced into buying recycling certificates from waste companies which they get from household waste.

For instance, my council forces us to put household waste in recycling bins or you get a hefty fine. grrrr... There is also the local recycling centres which have more and more specific disposal bins.. So, this all goes off to the recycling centres who dispose of it in creative ways like shredding it all up and turn it into road making ballast !!! ... that sort of thing. However, every ton that the recycling company recycles, (because they create very little carbon tonnage themselves, they can then sell (at a rediculously high price) as a certificate to other companies that haven't recycled enough and need to meet their quota to keep their national recycling standards. Sounds a rediculous state of affairs but many large organisations and government bodies (the big spenders) will only do business with companies that have these national recycling standards.

If I had my time over, I should have become a bin man and worked toward opening up my own waste company. Recycling companies basically have a licence to print money.

Kaminsky

As an aside to that, if my local council was clever enough to realise how recycling centres make their money, we could do a deal for our waste and nobody in the town would have to pay council tax each year. Such is the kind of money made by recycling centres.

Oooo 1000th post. woohoo

tdean

just found this while reading a data center efficiency paper on the realtime nexus site...

The Green Grid