Green at Interop

You can save green by going green with a pre-owned refurbished server, rack or workstation from Stallard Technologies, Inc. (STI). At this years Interop Las Vegas expo, Jeff Palmer, Vice President and COO of STI, recently explained how they refurbish equipment newly off-lease or pre-owned and give otherwise-destined-for-the-landfill IT equipment new life. And if it can't be re-used, it is broken down into components and recycled.

Greening your IT can result in saving some green. Data centers consume more energy per square foot than any other part of an office building, predominantly from servers and cooling. For example, Religare Enterprises Limited (REL), one of the leading financial services companies in India, is building three energy-efficient data centers that will reduce REL’s annual power costs by 30-35%, with estimated savings of over $250,000 a year. Associated Bank’s new data center expansion in Green Bay, Wisc., includes a new cooling system that will save the financial firm plenty of green – to the tune of $115,000 annually, reports American Banker.

But apart from STI, I noticed almost a laissez-faire attitude about green and very little mention of green or energy-efficiency in booth marketing at Interop, the leading business technology event, being held in Las Vegas, April 25-29, 2010. Maybe this is because of Forrester's survey data that states, "more energy is actually consumed by distributed IT assets in aggregate (e.g. PCs, monitors, printers, phones) – 55% across distributed IT vs. 45% in the data center. And even more so, the IT industry is only responsible for 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions." Clearly green was not a focus this year.

Doug Washburn on ZDNet.com, who spoke at Interop on “The Evolution Of Green IT: Projects That Cut Cost, Avoid Risk And Grow Revenues” to help IT professionals plan for green IT’s current and future state, suggests looking beyond greening traditional hardware to services, processes, software and people. Things like energy audits and power management software can result in significant energy and money savings.