Green IT: A promise for the future

IBM unveiled Project Big Green in 2007, dedicating $1 billion annually across
its businesses to increase energy efficiency with the launch of new products and
services that will reduce data center energy consumption, resulting in energy
savings of approximately 42 percent for an average data center. As part of this
project, IBM is building an $86 million green data center expansion at Colorado
where it will consolidate nearly 4,000 computer servers in six locations
worldwide onto about 30 mid-sized mainframes operating on Linux.

Under its revamped PartnerOne program announced earlier in 2008, HP added
Green Expressway, which provides partners with information specific to HP's
energy-efficiency programs, the latest environmental news, industry research and
more. Its entire personal workstation line also bagged a 'Gold' listing in the
Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool, which reflected their energy
efficiency. It also decided to double its global purchases of renewable power
from under four percent in 2008 to eight percent by 2012. This is part of its
goal to reduce energy consumption and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions
from HP-owned and HP-leased facilities worldwide to 16 percent below 2005 levels
by 2010. And this is where it is banking on utilizing diversified renewable
energy resources at its facilities worldwide.

Last year, Sun announced its Eco Initiatives which included Eco Advantage
Program (EAP) specifically for the channel. EAP offers partners Eco Assessment
Service, which is a technical evaluation of data center energy use, cooling
capacity, rack placement, air distribution and other environmental factors
besides Eco Modeling and RoI Tools that help partners model multiple power,
cooling and carbon savings scenarios. This further gets extended to
Implementation Methodologies that help partners deliver more energy and
cost-effective IT environments.

Practice what you preach seems to be Dell's mantra when it comes to going
green. The vendor has decided to opt for a packaging initiative by increasing
the sustainable content in cushioning and corrugate packaging by 40 percent and
ensure that 75 percent of its packaging components are curbside-recyclable by
2012. Through these and other similar initiatives the company hopes to save more
than $8 million over the next four years and eliminate 20 million pounds of
shipping materials. This aside, it has announced the Greenprint Advisor, a free
Web-based resource to help organizations access their green initiatives and
prioritize future actions.

It introduced Energy Logic last year in a bid to create a consortium of
leading vendors who could help IT and facility managers make decisions about
optimizing energy use and minimizing critical resource constraints. Other
vendors who partnered with them were Cisco, Dell, IBM and VMware.

Seagate has introduced three new hard drives for better efficiencies. The
Momentus 5400 power savings drive uses non-volatile cache, or flash memory, to
cost-effectively deliver the benefits of solid state disc drives. The Barracuda
ES and ES.2 enterprise drives are enabled with PowerTrim technology, that draw
minimal power when the drives are in an idle state. The Cheetah drives too are
equipped with PowerTrim technology, which allows users to achieve up to a 40
percent improvement in IOPS/watt performance. The enterprise-level Savvio drives
are 70 percent smaller than 3.5-inch drives, enabling more drives per system
ensuring ultra-low power consumption.

Nortel is focusing heavily on its services-powered Telepresence Solutions,
which it claims can reduce unnecessary carbon emissions by minimizing the need
for business travel. It has armed itself with other green solutions including
software tools like Energy Efficiency and Telepresence Return on Investment (RoI)
calculators, which demonstrate how IT professionals can reduce network energy
consumption. In fact, it had devised an energy savings credit program using
these calculators to help enterprises gauge their power savings by using Nortel
products and later credit customers that exact amount on their purchase.

Cisco introduced its Efficiency Assurance Program that helps enterprises to
estimate their energy efficiency in their data centers and identify areas where
it can be improved. This was jointly delivered by Cisco Advanced Services and
some qualified partners who were strong in the data center business. Besides
this, switches from Cisco were the first in the industry to be certified by
Miercom, a network product test center and consultancy, under its 'Certified
Green' testing program. It is also getting partners enthused about taking its
telepresence solutions to the market, highlighting how these will help companies
cut traveling cost and save on executive man-hours making them more productive.

The chipmaker announced its plans to purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt
hours a year of renewable energy certificates as part of a multi-faceted
approach to reduce its impact on the environment, making it the single-largest
corporate purchaser of green power in the US. This is the environmental
equivalent of taking more than 1,85,000 cars off the road annually, or avoiding
the amount of electricity needed to power more than 1,30,000 average American
homes annually.

AMD has formulated an annual Global Climate Protection Plan to reduce impact
on the climate via energy-efficient products, sustainable manufacturing and
operations, and corporate leadership initiatives. It first published this plan
in 2001, and since then has managed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40
percent till 2007. Within its product lines, it has attempted to bring better
performance efficiency with reduce power consumption. A case in point is its
Quad-Core Opteron processors have four cores on a single piece of silicon for
more efficient data sharing which reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO),
data center power needs, and cooling costs by lowering the energy consumption of
the IT infrastructure.

Source: DQNews Bureau