To update Gordon Gecko’s mantra to match a new economy, green has replaced greed as the new corporate slogan. The following five ideas will help create a greener data center and save your company money.

New Servers: IBM, HP and Dell all have released new lines of servers that take advantage of technology that reduces power consumption as well as heat output. New processors from Intel and AMD can reduce power consumption up to 30%. These systems with their small form factor and energy efficiency will also produce less heat, in turn saving even more energy by using less air conditioning to cool their components.

Virtualization: Consolidating multiple servers into a single box can greatly reduce the cost of processing as well as reducing the amount of air conditioning it takes to cool multiple serves. Virtualization software, available from Microsoft and VMware as well as other vendors, utilize a single piece of hardware to mimic a computer room worth of servers. Additional benefits such as scalability and smaller footprint save additional costs.

Power Management and ACPI: All newer systems come with power management that enables either the BIOS or Operating System to shut down items such as hard drives and monitor (video) after a certain inactivity time. Few people take advantage of this simple but energy saving item, or worse, disable the power management totally. Employing this simple feature can save over 20% of the power consumption over systems that do not utilize power management.

Clean up your data center: Look through your data center and you are probably going to find items that are turned on and not in use, items that can be eliminated by moving its function to a newer server and technology that is just old and needs replacing with greener technology.

Terminal Servers: Terminal servers replace the PC at the desktop and do the desktop processing on their server. Each user has a thin client that passes keyboard and mouse processes to and video from the server. Since the thin client has no hard drive and limited components there is a savings in energy costs, as much as 40%. Since maintenance is done on the server, it will save the company considerable costs on maintenance by eliminating software and hardware maintenance on the desktop.

When designing, purchasing or implementing any new procedures in your IT environment, all companies need to consider getting a little greener. 

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