If you were reading VentureBeat a couple of weeks ago, you may have seen an article suggesting that most people don’t care about global warming — despite a recent deluge of media about climate change and renewable energy, many people aren’t convinced. Today a new study is suggesting that the geeky, forward-thinking information technology industry is also behind on becoming environmentally friendly.
The study by Think Ecological, a group owned by BPM Forum, Intel and Rackable Systems, says that while over 80 percent of companies are more sensitive to ecological issues than they were a year ago, about the same number give their own industry “failing grades†in carrying out ecological practices.
To simplify some of the study’s findings, the people who control the computing infrastructures of major corporations are behind the curve, spending their time hounding employees about not printing out emails rather than tackling major issues such as reducing the amount of energy that power-sucking server farms consume.
An interesting article on several levels, we need to establish with business buy-in, two core values:
The example I like to use at this point is that 1u rack server which might earn you £10,000 a month say in revenue, say it’s one of your web servers to your e commerce platform. At this point, I’ll assume the existing server costs us £300 a month to run including any operating system/hardware support and the cost of power.
There are two mind sets:
Therefore an investment of £2,000 on a new server, might lead to increased revenue as well as the following:
Is the issue back to the core problem that most businesses face. I haven’t got a transaction cost, a cost or value that I can put upon the server, the application to establish if I spend £1,000 here, what does that mean, to the unix guys, to the data center team and the application support team, the end users?
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