Some Enterprise Green IT initiatives that can reduce costs and carbon!

We always knew that implementing a few enterprise Green IT initiatives can go a long way in reducing energy costs and our carbon footprint. But somehow, energy efficiency and green IT initiatives get only secondary importance in many companies. In this post, I have suggested certain green IT initiatives, but it would be better if people get inspired and implement the green policies that they always wanted to implement, in their organizations.

• While buying any products for IT requirements, do check their energy utilization parameters and energy-saving features. Insist on energy efficiency as one of the important parameters during the RFP stage and get written compliance statements from vendors.
• While selecting IT products, check if they can be recycled as you need to inevitably dump them after a few years.
• Government’s across the world have schemes for collecting and recycling e-waste. Be aware of them and utilize them.
• Try to elongate the life-time of IT products, as much as possible. Old servers may not be good enough to host applications, but they can become a work station. Old switches may not be useful in the head office, but they might be useful for that remote warehouse. Think about alternative uses for IT products before dumping them.
• Switch to e-forms and e-papers. Reduce the amount of physical paper as much as possible.
• Find innovative ways to reduce the amount of cooling required for your data center. Or just learn from companies who have already done it. It is even better if you can utilize the cold air outside to cool IT equipment inside, if your data center is located in cold areas like Finland.
• There can even be zero-carbon data centers. There are.
• Try to purchase power from a renewable energy developer/power plant.
• Better, implement renewable energy systems (like solar panels, wind mills, etc.) to power your data center. There are data centers that have used a renewable energy source as their primary source of electricity. If you feel that a bit risky, you can at least use them as a secondary/back-up power source. This not only reduces running costs but can also reduce your dependence on the power grid, and reduce the required UPS capacity.
• Use server virtualization and desktop virtualization technologies as they can save a lot of power. I guess people are already doing this.
• Right-size your data center/computing hardware.
• Before buying networking equipment, do check if they support the IEEE 802.11az – Energy Efficient Ethernet standard.
• Use solar-powered components like solar IP surveillance cameras, where they make sense.

Perhaps the most important among all, is to have a clear, well-documented Green IT policy for your organization. If you want to start, you can start with this one.

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