Sunday 22 April 2012

What is Green IT?

Green IT is the technology of new, innovative ways to make changes in daily life. Currently, this concept of new energy consumption is in the beginning stages of its development, so the future will only bring bigger and better things for this field. [4]

The use of clean green technology theoretically reduces the amount of waste and pollution that is created during production and consumption, this technology also attempts to achieve economic viability and improved system performance and use, while abiding to our social and ethical responsibilities. (1)

Goals; Green technology is the future of this world. Its main goal is to find ways to produce technology in ways that do not damage or deplete the Earth's natural resources. Also another objective would be to reduce the use of hazardous materials, resource consumption and proper disposal of electronic waste.  

Approaches to green computing?  Energy costs of IT and data center operations are significantly high, whether from internal corporate operations or as part of IT outsourcing, power consumption, or cooling, inefficient equipment operations, e.g. data servers (spinning) when no active operations are being performed. In old days energy costs were assumed to be free. In current environment, equipment costs have been reduced, putting focus on energy.

Virtualization; In computing, it is the creation of a virtual version of an object, such as a hardware platform, operating system, storage device, or network resources.  Virtualization fits in very nicely with the idea of ‘Green Computing’ thru consolidating servers and maximizing CPU processing power on other servers.  This allows the storage to be located in anywhere on earth, and on just about any device.  Virtualization includes server virtualization and consolidation, storage consolidation and desktop virtualization. These projects typically improve cost and energy efficiency.

Computer virtualization on the other hand is the process of running two or more logical computer systems on one set of physical hardware.

Server virtualization usually increase network utilization and reduces network equipment needs by allowing multiple virtual servers to share one or more network adapter within the confines of a single physical server.   

One of the primary goals of almost all forms of virtualization is making the most efficient use of available system resources.



More info will be shared in the upcoming posts.  

Future of Green IT:  In today’s world if we think that computers do not negatively affect the environment and consume very little energy, we need to think again.  It is estimated that out of $250b/year spent on powering computers worldwide only about 15% of that power is spent on computing, the rest is wasted idling. Opportunities lie in green technology more than ever. Organizations are witnessing this as a way to create new profit centers while trying to help the environment cause.  Comprising new electronic products and services with optimum efficiency and all possible options towards energy savings through Green IT is the only plan for better environment.

Rounding off, the main features of green computing would be resource efficiency, recyclability, service model, and self-powering. Green IT will be one of the major contributions which will break down the “digital divide”, the electronic gulf that separates the information rich from the information poor. (2)


References:
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_computing
(2) http://www.slideshare.net/Nikunj_Agrawal/green-computing-seminar-4856195
(3) ‘Green IT for Dummies’ – Hewlett Packard Limited Edition
(4) A B Turban, E; King, D; Lee, J; Viehland, D (2008). "Chapter 19: Building E-Commerce Applications and      Infrastructure". Electronic Commerce A Managerial Perspective. pp. 27.
(5) http://mayfairtechnology.com/green/greentechnology.html