Green IT Toolkit
Story: Green IT at the flick of a switch
good intentions
Heidi-Lynn is absolutely right on the most important point in this article - i.e. apply Green IT to the architectural and operational principles of your organisation does, by its very nature, save money. The real choice is over timescales and degrees of return from investment.
The main important point which I believe is missing here though is the application of Green IT to the architecture, not just the operations.
A good example is an extention of the statement that turning off PCs overnight saves £53 per desktop. If we apply thin client technologies we save much more, and thats just on the power. This also addresses the problem of upgrading each desktop when we need to move to Windows/Office 200x etc .... more so, it negates the need for, the far more expensive and time consuming tasks, in upgrading the software or operating environment at each desktop.
Focusing on the leading, and most important, word in the Reduce/Reuse/Recycle mantra - a key element underlying each of these type of approaches is to minimise the amount of hardware churn in an organisation. This will be a whole new challenge to the volume providers, such as Computacenter.
Supporting/Encouraging manufacters to focus on the recycle element is also key.
The ability to apply Green principles in this way, not simply blinkered within the architecture of the IT function but also across the whole business strategy, will be a vital element within CxO agendas ... whether we have the people/abilities in place to adapt to this new culture is the £M question!
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