‘Green IT’ means many things to many people and there is no doubt it’s a complex topic ranging across the design, manufacture, usage pattern and disposal of a device and/or system. In the past few years, ‘Green IT’ has been seen by some as a ‘nice to have’ and something that costs money to implement. In the current economic climate, something that costs more money is not a great idea to take to your CEO, but this is changing. Electricity is still a very expensive resource and with the mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) coming into force next year in the UK, more and more people are looking at this hidden cost.

Today, only around 10% of IT managers actually know what they’re spending on energy. And what sometimes surprises people, is that a substantial part of your energy consumption will be coming from devices that aren’t actually doing anything. There are probably lots of people running devices 24/7 for no other reason than because they always have done.

So while one can conduct large and complex Eco projects, there are a few simple things one can do with little or no cost.

The first thing to do, regardless of time or budget, is to understand exactly how much energy you are consuming. Invest in a few power reading adaptors, as these will tell you exactly how much energy a device(s) are using. Once you know this, for a specific device, a computer room, a datacenter etc, then you can do something about it. The usual mantra that everyone should follow is: if you’re not using it turn it off. Particularly PCs at night time. Now many may say this is not possible as they need to run patches overnight. However, this can be managed, as technologies exist such as vPro that allow you to power up/down PC’s remotely so patches and updates can be applied. And please, no screensavers. Sure they look great with the family photo’s but they result in the PC/laptop consuming a lot of energy. Also, look at the hardware you have: a two to three year old desktop with a CRT screen could be using up to 15 times more energy than a modern mid-range laptop.

You’ll find a lot more simple ideas and information on energy efficiency at the Climate Savers Computing Initiative web site ( http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org ) and for energy efficiency in the datacenter, the Green Grid (http://thegreengrid.org/) provides a lot of info, methodologies, best practices and case studies.

Kevin.