The need for IT to become more efficient

http://hardware.silicon.com/servers/0,39024647,39183832,00.htm

Despite their best intentions, many organisations are overlooking the real environmental impact of IT operations. That’s down to a major break-down in communications between the board and IT management, argues Dennis Szubert.

The aviation industry is public enemy number one for many environmentalists. Aircrafts pump out more than 600 million tons of carbon dioxide every year - nearly as much as the whole of Africa.

Pressured by the environmentalists, the aircraft manufacturers and operators are pursuing new technologies and approaches to improve fuel consumption.

Check out this article which is talking about the impact of IT on an organizations’ environmental impact, an interesting read and raises some important issues.

Is the issue not one of corporate and business alignment? That the needs of the business need to be linked to the ability of IT to deliver? That at the same time IT can take the initiative to make the changes it needs to improve service delivery, to reduce operation costs? That by applying that rule to virtualize the server estate we might reduce our energy consumption, abstract the end user/the business activity from the underlying hardware, get the benefit of a virtualized infrastructure? There might be a cost of doing this, but the benefits should be greater than the costs, not only might I reduce the hardware support contract, I might reduce the ‘time to live’, the time it takes to increase capacity, to allocate capacity/performance between applications or business units, that I might with the right investment, business buy in and configuration have a fluid type infrastructure - where the workload moves around the business need. During 9-5 business hours the virtualization infrastructure is at 100% capacity, as the business day ends, we might have automated processes to reduce this capacity, the number of physical assets to what’s needed to provide the infrastructure overnight - the overnight batch runs/reports etc.