Green IT matters

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: by a single passenger flying from London to Cairo. Spread this acr-oss a distributed desktop environment of 2,000 PCs and you have an annual carbon footprint of 2,188 tonne of CO2.

The bright side is that there are so many inefficiencies in IT that these are low-hanging fruits to bring down CO2 emissions.

Several methods are available for minimising the environmental impact of a computing system.

Power generation: One of the goals of green computing is to use power generated from sources that are more environmentally friendly than coal-fired power stations.

Virtualisation: Computer virtualisation is the process of running two or more logical computer systems on one set of physical hardware. With virtualisation, a system administrator could combine several physical systems into virtual machines on one single, powerful system, thereby unplugging the original hardware and reducing power and cooling consumption.

Power management: An open industry standard called advanced configuration and power interface provides a standard programming interface that allows an OS to directly control the power saving aspects of the hardware. This allows the system to automatically turn off components such as monitors and hard drives after set periods of inactivity. In addition, a system may hibernate, in which it turns off nearly all components, including the CPU and the system RAM, greatly reducing the system’s electricity usage.

* Centralising and consolidating storage capacity on storage networks.

* Outsourcing the datacentre to a service provider, which can distribute computing resources to customers on an as-needed, resources-efficient basis.

* Deploying more energy-efficient servers and storage devices.

* Deploying more efficient cooling and airflow systems, and uninterruptible power supplies.

* Installing sensors and software to track and regulate coolinga nd airflow.

Carbon Credits: Carbon credits create a market for reducing greenhouse emissions by giving a monetary value to the cost of polluting the air. Emissions become an internal cost of doing business and are visible on the balance sheet alongside raw materials and other liabilities or assets.