Information technology as a percentage of total energy in most industrial organisations is of little significance on the face of it. However, many of these organisations still run 1000′s of devices and reducing energy can improve the green credentials of these organisations that struggle with corporate social responsibility initiatives.
More importantly however, applying technology to reduce emissions elsewhere in the organisation can have far greater impacts.
Direct reductions within the IT department:
Focus on the low hanging fruit first. The lowest of these is actually the desktop and monitor infrastructure which use as much as 39% of the total energy footprint. Powering off these PC’s automatically can create some significant savings for any organisation with 1000′s of devices. NightWatchman, the world’s leading solution in this area can save organisations as much as R200 per desktop per annum and still ensure that patching and management occurs through its reliable and scaleable WakeUP technology.
The datacentre should be the next area of focus, accounting for around 23% of the total energy of the IT department. Here care should be taken to ensure that the datacentre is designed efficiently with hot and cold aisles and the correct temperature and humidity controls. A datacentre that is too cold can be a significant drain on energy which is wasted.
Further savings in the datacentre include virtualisation which can have as much as an 80% saving on energy. Look out for emerging technologies that will place servers into lower power states, reducing significant energy overnight when servers are still running but doing no productive work.
Measurement
Measuring non financial perfomance data is going to become increasingly important to the IT organisation, even more so for the industrial giants with emerging global carbon taxation and trade tarriffs. Environmental Intelligence Software provides a platform to manage this data in a central repository as well as provide a mechanism to manage carbon out of the business.
Assessment
sustainableIT offers companies a Green IT Baseline which provides organisations with a strategic roadmap in terms of how to optimise the IT service from procurement through to disposal. We have built up a wealth of intellectual capital in this field and offer customers a relatively simple and painless engagement with a deliverable that is a pragmatic report documenting how the organisation is performing against environmental best practice and what strategies should be adopted to achieve increased cost reductions and improve the environmental credentials of the organisation.
This engagement can be extended to include the secondary impacts that IT can have on the buisness such as dematerialisation or other co2 reduction initiatives. Contact us for more information around how we can assist you with your green IT initiatives.