Friday, August 19, 2011

Adopting the ‘Green Computing’ Strategy


Every IT company is committed to act on the environmental impact that is created because of their increasing power consumption for data centers. With energy consumption for computing and relative energy costs reaching all time high in recent times, it becomes all the more important for IT companies to work towards ‘Green Computing Architecture’. The Green IT solution can aid in formulating a Green IT strategy, designing and manufacturing greener products and green procurement of energy efficient products which have complete green lifecycle right from inception to disposal.
Green Goals
Zero emission data centres, ultrasonic humidification, harmonic mitigating transformers, variable frequency drives are some of the initiatives that are taken by Indian MNCs in their drive towards Green Computing. These Green enterprise wide initiatives can be set at an organization strategy level and then be adopted on a top down approach leading to green business processes and Green workplace for employees. Green goals can also follow a bottom-up approach wherein seeds of green initiative can be sown at IT level and then progress towards an enterprise wide green initiative. This clearly indicates that it is imperative for CIOs to realize the green horizon beyond just energy efficiency and carbon footprint reduction.
Green Engineering

IT companies must assess assets based on carbon footprint. They should consider details such as ageing, customer’s asset life cycle and IT asset policies as well. This ensures that existing assets are optimally used instead of spending on adding new assets (IT infrastructure).

IT Infrastructure
IT infrastructure is critical to any company as it provides networking services and real-time connectivity for an organization, especially for those in financial and trading sectors. By using technology like ‘cloud computing’ companies can ensure advanced “virtually real” interaction among people using high speed tele-meeting/conferencing, grid computing facilities. This would also help people to connect real time without being physically present at one location. 
Another technology that is now becoming popular is the usage of ‘zero-emission data centers’ that reduce the energy consumption by 40 per cent and directly reuse waste heat, for example, for space heating. This can effectively reduce carbon dioxide emission by 85 per cent and, efficiency and payback for heat cut energy costs by a factor of 2 with a return-on-investment of less than two years.

By adopting
 Green Computing Architecture, companies can create emission-free computing and data centers. Also, by using features such as co-location services, companies can share their delivery services, storage and backup, networks and information security services, ultimately, enhancing overall productivity as well.

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