Pledging for a Green Future!

Every year, June 5 is celebrated as the World Environment Day, a concept
promoted by United Nations as part of their United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP). Interestingly, this year UNEP focused on providing solar energy to the
villagers and school children apart from a funding of $85,000 for gorilla
conservation.

Not to mention IT companies are also not lagging behind to put their best
efforts forward to promote green and contribute to the overall green initiatives
to address global warming concerns. This year saw a lot of companies coming out
with certain interesting concepts on World Environment Day, which in a long run
would ensure benefits for both the industry and the consumers. For example, Dell
had committed to become the greenest company of the planet. It launched the
'Dell Go Green Challenge' to raise awareness and community involvement in green
initiatives in India. It is also committed to eliminate PVC and brominated flame
retardants from all newly shipping products by the end of 2011, and already
ships several PVC/BFR-free/reduced products. Green IT practices such as data
center virtualization, better data center design and layout, and asset lifecycle
management, which reduce the need for capex, are becoming increasingly important
as IT budgets remain constrained.

Says Deepak Visweswaraiah, Senior Director, Storage Software Group (SSG),
India Center of Excellence, EMC Corporation, "Our CoE is a delivery center in
which engineers and other employees perform R&D, IT, support services,
back-office functions, and much more. It has a large footprint, but it also has
electricity reduction programs in full swing. Once, each team within a given CoE
had its own equipment running on weekends. Now, they decide together, how many
physical servers and arrays really must remain on after work hours. Our team
designed a tool to identify which systems, lab managers can power down that
weekend. We're seeing substantial electricity savings as a result of the weekend
shut down of data centers."

Infosys celebrated Environment Day 2010 across its Development Centers in
India through activities organized by Infosys' Green Connect team and ECO
Groups. The launch of Infy SmartWatt Championship, a contest that aims at
encouraging Infoscions and their families to reduce their electricity
consumption over the next six months was another key initiative of Infosys. The
Infy SmartWatt Championship was developed with the objective to strengthen
awareness and actions in building sustainable lifestyles, and aims at
influencing the demand side efficiency of power consumption.

Says Visweswaraiah, "Global consulting firm Mckinsey estimates that 2 percent
of all global carbon emissions are contributed by data centers, the lifeline of
corporate IT. This figure is likely to increase to 3 percent by 2020-not a
trivial figure by any count. No wonder, there's pressure on enterprise IT
leaders to adopt measures that make IT greener. However, it's not just emissions
or carbon footprints that are making organizations sit up and take notice. Green
IT is not only an environmental prerogative but also an economic imperative
given the depleting energy resources on one hand and the huge potential for cost
savings by going green on the other."

Green is the Future

It is evident that companies of all sizes, across geographies and verticals
have considered the importance of Green IT. IT greening is about using IT more
efficiently to achieve reductions in energy consumption, and therefore,
considering the acquisition of energy-efficient IT solutions. IT is so pervasive
that energy efficiency through the implementation of green IT has moved to
center stage and captured the limelight for many companies in their pursuit of
environmentally helpful practices.

PC Suraj

(Source: DQ)