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(Editor’s note: the following is a condensed version of a GridBriefing on Green IT, that was just published on 31 July.)

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Across Europe, efforts are being made to reduce energy usage and carbon emissions by 20% by the year 2020. The European Commission has identified Information and Communication technologies (ICTs) as key to accomplishing this.

It hopes to cut our carbon footprint all across the economy by harnessing technologies such as virtualization, and by investing in ICT research — which together promise to reduce energy consumption and increase our knowledge of the changing climate.

Looking at both the infrastructure (energy efficient configurations), and the application, grid, application consolidation can all play their part in reducing your energy costs, going forward I wonder if we’ll see more tier’d application/user roles – is it a pc you need, or can we put everything online working in any location? What level of availability does that role or application have? How crucial is it to your business and how much investment, how much carbon cost are your prepared to absorb or pay?

Certainly grid could be seen as a green platform in terms of consolidating processing and workloads to a common shared infrastructure, how energy efficient it is will depend on the configuration and can be debated until the end of time. The focus needs to remain on business transformation and empowerment through the effective and appropriate use of technology, if I can have my common revenue neutral back office workload and business done on a common platform, with the front end customer/user interfacing applications on the high availability infrastructure, the 5x9s, (99.999% available), related to this though is that ‘boring’ problem – what IT functions, what services are core to your business, consider email, ftp, active directory, file and print?

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