Green IT: using computers and IT resources efficiently and environmentally responsibly.
Green computing is the practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computer equipment efficiently, with minimal or no impact on the environment. The concept of Green Computing emerged in 1992, addressing energy use and the impact of e-waste on the environment. It’s responsible for the energy saving sleep mode on computers, cell phones and tablets.
What’s the business value in Green IT?
Why is it good to have a green computing initiative for your business?
Costs motivate small to mid-business owners to “go green”. Computers, monitors, servers, switches, attached storage devices, cluster boxes, uninterrupted power supplies and other attached peripherals are expensive to buy, expensive to power and expensive to maintain.
Green IT Business Benefit: Reduced Costs
How many servers are in your data center? Servers consume more electricity than any other business network device. A company with five or more servers in a server room, uses a significant amount of energy. Companies spend thousands of dollars on servers, equipment, replacements, and the HVAC equipment to keep server rooms and data centers at the right temperature.
Reduce Equipment Costs With Server Virtualization
It’s not necessary to have so many servers. Server virtualization makes it possible to run one or multiple mini-servers within a single physical server. Companies reducing the overall number of physical servers work just as effectively by using cloud strategies.
Server consolidation is affordable, even for small companies.
Server consolidation benefits*:
- Energy costs reduce by as much as 80 percent, saving more than $3,000 per year for each virtualized server workload
- New server provision time reduces by as much as 70 percent
- Hardware requirements reduce. Each host server running vSphere can support 1024+ virtual machines. Many organizations run as many as 15 applications on a single piece of hardware, reducing their hardware requirements by a 15:1 ratio
- Reduces amount of space needed for server room/data center
- Automates tedious daily IT tasks like provisioning, hardware maintenance and performance management. This allows an in-house IT team to focus on strategies which will grow a business, not just maintain it.