Green IT and more (Part IV) – Changing Staff Attitudes and Taking Action

Taking things further

• Make the chief information officer (CIO or equivalent) responsible for all computing energy accounting
• Enable remote access to applications to facilitate home and on-the-road working to cut commutes
• Secure your own environmental certifications; then encourage suppliers to do the same
• Install time switches for non-IT equipment
• Install electricity meters so you can see where power is being used
• Include environmental information in your own supplier records
• Install a power management system for networked devices, wherever possible
• Install print servers and print management systems
• Reuse waste heat from the data centre
• Implement delivery/pickup/route optimisation software

Nearing green nirvana

• Audit your data centre and remove unused equipment and software
• Virtualise applications, storage and servers in the data centre wherever appropriate
• Consider consolidating data centres
• Resite the data centre to a direct source of renewable energy
• Ensure that data centre cooling equipment is optimised to the new arrangements
• Incorporate free cooling if your climate is appropriate
• Install sensors and controls in company premises and remote locations to ensure that devices aren’t on when no one’s around
• Consider switching to thin client desktop devices (and maybe out of the office too)
• Move infrequently accessed data off continuously rotating disks (implement hierarchical storage)
• Introduce videoconferencing or telepresence facilities

Newsflash: Council optimises printer fleet

Although only part way through optimising its printer fleet, printer costs at Lancashire County Council are heading for a 36 per cent reduction. Before the initiative started, the council had 2,900 networked machines. The printers and photocopiers are being replaced with one multifunction machine for every seven that existed previously.

Energy consumption has dropped by 75 per cent. Mono print output dropped by 43 per cent and colour by 36 per cent in a year, so paper and toner cartridge consumption has dropped too.

New capabilities mean that documents can be securely printed to a machine in the nearest office, removing the need for staff to travel back to their own offices. Another win for the environment and for the bottom line.

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