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Environmental leader

A new online calculator allows companies to estimate the carbon footprint and related costs from their data centers, as well as from co-location facilities.

The Eco-IT Monitor is a project between SGI, Intel and BPM Forum.

The online tool is designed to help IT professionals and data center managers learn how to cut emissions and expenses by suggesting specific best practices.

These tools can be useful and highlight elements of green computing which has to be a good thing for the end user community and environmental community alike, we need to move towards a more big approach to Green IT, to a Green business (if there is such a thing). Just because I take the big picture, doesn’t mean we can’t compartmentalize it to a set of small achievable projects which can run in parallel to achieve a reduced operating cost or energy footprint. For example in the SMB:

• Set screensaver to blank on all pcs
• Set desktops to power pc on and off (this can be done in the bios on some pcs)
• Turn on power management options
• Replace computers with thin clients/energy efficient desktops
• Unplug devices that aren’t in use

These might be done in parallel and might vary between long term and short term in terms of project goals and what’s achievable. More long term examples might be:

• Virtualization of the application and infrastructure, combined with consolidation of server roles and applications to what we need, combining functionality or features where possible.
• Data design and usage patterns combined with application design – stop data duplication and create feeds where possible, to avoid data being duplicated throughout the network for specific roles, centralize data/batches where possible.
• Move to a shared infrastructure common platform pay on use IT delivery system
• Look at cloud solutions in which you can buy in the functionality you need for specific requirements – email/storage

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