Industry association the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is developing a plan to research and promote best practices for green IT while the group will also aim for carbon neutrality in its own operations.
In response to efforts from individual IT companies as well as the recognition that technological innovations can offer significant solutions to the global climate challenge, the ITU has formed the Focus Group on ICTs and Climate Change, which has already begun work and will meet in person next month to assess progress.
BigFix Power Management and the U.S. General Services Administration yesterday announced a program to provide discounted licenses of BigFix's computer power management software as part of the GSA's SmartBuy procurement program.
The GSA will determine how many of its 15,000 laptop and desktop computers can run the BigFix software, and will then purchase licenses at the rate of $3 each. BigFix estimates that running the power management software can save $50 per year, per computer; if all of the GSA's machines run the software, the agency could save up to $750,000 per year.
Of 27 tech trends that Gartner analysts predict will make a major impact on business IT operations in coming years, three of the most promising offer environmental benefits to companies as well as advantages in efficiency and innovation.
The 2008 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," authored by Gartner VP Jackie Fenn, pinpointed green IT, video teleconferencing and cloud computing as trends to watch; also on list of hyped technologies are social networking services and microblogging platforms like Twitter.
Wonder how much in energy costs you can save by virtualizing key enterprise apps? The Virtual Geek's blog about VMware has a great piece that shows how to save 74% in energy costs by virtualizing Sharepoint with VMware.
Check out the piece for nitty-gritty details of the physical and virtual configurations, as well as performance charts, CPU utilization
and more. Here, though, are the high-level findings:
Saving power on your PC is a bit like Mark Twain's saying about the weather: Everyone complains about it, but no one does anything about it.
Here's your chance to do something about it, in a small way. Verdiem just released the free Edison software, that makes it far easier to use the power management features of your PC. With it, you won't have to wade through Windows' confusing menus and options to try and fine-tune power savings. You'll only need to move some sliders, click a few buttons, and you'll be done.
You've no doubt heard about Intel's Atom chip, used for the newest generation of tiny, inexpensive laptops often called nettops.
Here's a twist: the UK hosting company Bytemark is using Atom-based servers to run low-powered Linux-based servers, and in doing so, saves a tremendous amount of energy.
Bytemark's Matthew Bloch told the Register that Bytemark uses Atom-based servers with 2 GB of RAM and a pair of 100GB SATA drives each.
Work to measure and steadily improve energy use by servers is progressing steadily, with Microsoft and the EPA both undergoing server efficiency tests.
In an article in CIO magazine, Nancy Gohring reports that Microsoft has developed an extensive program to monitor temperature and humidity in several of their data centers. The company is using around 2,000 sensors that wirelessly report the status of the data centers.
Verdiem this week uneveiled Edison, a free version of its Surveyor energy management software, designed to "bring PC energy management to the masses."
As part of the launch, Verdiem and Microsoft are touting the software as a way for individual computers to play a role in the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which aims to reduce the overall emissions from global IT by 54 million tons in the next two years.
Five laptops and five desktops were rated as the greenest of the year this week by MetaEfficient, a website dedicated to covering energy efficiency in all its forms.
The list was developed based primarily on energy efficiency and reduction of hazardous materials, but it also included power supply efficiency, recyclability and packaging. The three main certifications used in decided the list are the Green Electronics Council's EPEAT label, the U.S. EPA's Energy Star certification, and the E.U.'s RoHS directive requirements.
