Green IT

The book I read to research this post was Green IT for Dummies by Carol Baroudi which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. This book differs from Green Home Computing for Dummies in that it concerns the data center environment. The biggest bill for most data centers is the electricity bill which can be offset in a green way by having solar panels or a wind turbine. Most data centers have diesel generators in case of power outage. Another big cost is cooling if the density of the computing power exceeds 200 Watts per square foot you need liquid cooling rather than fan cooling. Some companies use something like a canal or a lake where the water can be taken deep down where it's coolest & circulated around the plant. There are often restrictions on this like the water can't be heated to the extent that it kills living organisms. Often a data center will have a cooling tower on its roof to cool the water especially in moderately cold climates. Another development is virtualization which allows programs like exchange server & sharepoint server which at one time would have been run on separate servers to be run on the same server. Another point is the price per Gigabyte of hard drives has come down although there was a glitch when they had the floods in Thailand. Apparently most hard drives are manufactured there. A lot of companies use workstations that are thin clients which the programs are either run on either a cloud server or a company, this requires less maintenance. A final issue is netbooks which are as powerful as desktop computers which were built 2 years prior. A lot of companies are using these instead of laptops & they use less electric & are more portable. Also a lot of companies find it easier to offload newer computers which they often get paid for than to keep their computers as long as possible & then pay for them to be scrapped.