Video: How To Overcome Green Fatigue

Tech marketing over-did it and gave us all “Green Fatigue“. But we still need to get more efficient, because the underlying problems are still there.

A few years back there was a Green IT bandwagon, but since the financial crisis hit, it’s become a lot less fashionable. That’s a shame, because there’s a lot of efficiency work to be done, Microsoft evangelist Andrew Fryer told us in a video interview.

Cloud is the new green

“When I give a talk it is a great way of turning the audience off,” Fryer said. Despite this, it’s important to run servers as efficiently as possible because wasting energy also wastes money, as well as contributing to global warming.

Replacing servers regularly is a bad thing to do, owing to the embedded energy in the hardware. Instead it’s better to “sweat the assets”, running them for longer and also running them at a hotter temperature, said Fryer, echoing the sentiment that a warmer server room could contribute to a cooler planet.

Moving to the cloud is Fryer’s advice for tired tech people – that way your IT is in a larger and more optimised data centre, and the green effort is done for you. “Cloud is a new work for Green IT,” he says.

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