Green IT for Dummies®

Chapter 1. Win-Win Winning with Green IT

In This Chapter

• Seeing that green IT can work for you

• Greeting the triple bottom line

• Getting a handle on the IT ecosystem

• Taking lessons from green trailblazers

• Strategizing green for now and later

Greening IT won't be as painful as you might think. The information technology community has many straightforward opportunities to help solve problems affecting our environment just by doing what you do best — making informed choices and sound investments and using them to deploy quality solutions. These green choices and investments can save your organization money in the long run, and often in the short run as well.

You may have heard that meeting green needs in business requires sacrifice, belt tightening, and lost profits. These conditions may result when greening other business practices, but greening IT is different for two reasons:

• IT suffers from inefficient practices: We've been bad. In the rush to deploy the amazing advances in computing and communication, IT departments have adopted very inefficient practices. Simply put, they tend to throw hardware at every problem. The IBM Corporation estimates that for every 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity supplied by the power company to a typical data center, as few as 3 kilowatt-hours are actually doing productive work. The remaining energy is consumed by first powering and then cooling underused hardware.

  Greening IT means finding better ways of storing and processing data, that recover much of that ...