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Green IT has become a trend. Preceded by households and individuals, it is now up to the world of IT to become environmentally conscious. Every year, the IT sector is responsible for twenty million kilograms of waste material and produces as much CO2 as the aviation industry. However, a lot of good can be achieved with cooling systems, virtualization and recycling. The question is whether IT managers are actually willing to reduce the size of their organizations ecological footprint? Is green IT just hype or are green ideals beginning to influence our decisions?
TEXT: JOHANNA KIRN & HENRIEKE KORTEN
Current situation
Green IT has been all over the media for two years now. At the Cebit 2008 exhibition in Hannover, Germany, Green IT was the central theme. Companies are currently interested in green IT mainly because of cost savings; toxic substances are only given minor attention. Companies with an
active green IT policy focus on server and data centre cooling. Green IT revolves around two things: reducing CO2 emissions in IT (consider emissions produced from manufacturing and power consumption) and decreasing the amount of toxic substances in hardware components. It is
estimated that two percent of all global CO2 emissions are caused by the IT sector. Two-thirds of these emissions arise from the actual use of IT, while 25 percent of them are the result of data centres. The remaining emissions are generated during the actual production of hardware and the processing of IT waste materials.
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additional peripherals are required, power consumption is reduced. Cooling systems Free cooling means that a super cooling device is installed on the roof of the office building, which uses external air to control the temperature of the computer room. With a capacity of 600 kW on the roof, it can sufficiently cool down a computer room of 2000 m2 if outdoor temperatures remain at or below 9C . Above 9C, a compressor is activated to provide additional cooling power. Because the heat exchange is always pre-cooled, less electricity is needed. Another cooling method is cold corridor, in which servers are lined-up and cold air is drawn from a cold corridor. The heat exchange takes place via a warm corridor directly above the cold corridor. The two air currents are closed off from one another using wind shields, preventing the warm and cold air streams from coming into contact. This method reduces power consumption by 20%.
Quick wins
What is the best way for a company to make a green profit? Popular methods, which have been used many times already, include thin clients, virtualization and improved cooling systems. Thin clients Thin clients are advanced terminals that do not have any processing power; their sole purpose is to transfer data from one server to another. By using thin clients instead of desktops, a company with 175 work stations can save 660 euros per work station in energy consumption and administrative costs over a period of five years (Frauenhofer Institut UMSICHT). Furthermore, CO2 emissions are reduced by 54 percent per work station, because thin clients require less power during the production, assembly and distribution phases.
Virtualization The already popularised use of server visualization is another way to reduce the electricity bill. In this process, the hard drive is partitioned. Because every virtual hard drive has its own operating system and since no
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and reusing them is powerconsuming all the same. In many cases, processing unserviceable hardware is environmentally harmful. In particular, environmental pollution is a problem in China and other Asian countries, where western countries often dump their used hardware.
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