Green IT

The environmental benefits are many … reduced use of fossil fuels, lower quantities of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere, less consumption of basic raw materials, reduced amounts of materials going to landfills, and avoidance of exposure to unhealthy or toxic materials.


Many people are familiar with the “three R's” of the environmental movement: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The Green IT approach to design and management of IT systems includes the three R's but starts with an E … Eliminate.

Eliminate

The first step in environmentally responsible design and management is ensuring that every item purchased and used actually is needed. Frequently IT systems include unnecessary, redundant, or overlapping components that can be eliminated through detailed analysis and forward-looking design. Careful management can also identify existing system elements that are no longer needed. Electronic equipment that doesn’t exist doesn’t use raw materials, consume electricity, or end up in a landfill.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Compared to other industrial goods, production of electronic devices is energy and raw material intensive in manufacturing and distribution. Electronic equipment also tends to have a much shorter useful life than other commercial equipment. All IT and communications equipment consumes electricity and produces heat. All systems produce packaging waste at initial delivery. Many systems produce significant volumes of solid waste through use, including toxic wastes. At end of life, very few IT systems are recycled.

Awareness of the negative environmental effects of IT equipment is growing, and so is the application of the three R’s to those systems. For all elements of IT systems, there are an increasing number of options to reduce the amount of equipment needed and the power consumed, to find a new use for existing equipment, and to properly recycle system components that have truly reached the end of their useful life.

Reference Material from:

http://www.greenit.net/benefits.html




"Green IT. This is a path that more and more companies are taking as a socially responsible strategy. A green approach is multifaceted and can affect data center operations in a number of ways, such as moving workloads based on energy efficiency and using the most power-inefficient servers only at times of peak usage"

Carl Claunch