IT key to greener world

The world will need to invest in a lot more technology to have any meaningful impact on climate change and other environmental concerns believes the World Wildlife Foundation, the global conservation organisation.

"IT is too good at too many things," said Dennis Pamlin, WWF global policy adviser, speaking at HP's Technology@Work event in Barcelona. "The problem today is that it's not being used enough."

Echoing views from other environmental organisations WWF wants to persuade businesses to invest in more environmentally friendly technologies, not only in the data centre but in other areas such as remote working, video conferencing and online billing.

"The IT industry needs to shift its focus," said Pamlin. "It is already waking up to the fact it needs to develop more environmentally sustainable technologies to tackle the two per cent contribution it makes to global emissions. But we talk about the '98 per cent window', where IT can also be used to deliver a much bigger chunk of savings."

Pamlin pointed to the key role technology can play in reducing work-related travel and the need for office space, and also in facilitating greener buildings with intelligent access and environmental control systems.

Chandrakant Patel, HP Labs' sustainable IT ecosystem software lab director and enterprise systems fellow agreed. "We are going after the 98 per cent opportunity. But, in order to achieve that, we need to balance the demand and supply sides," he said.

The key to achieving such balance was eliminating the over-provisioning of technology in data centres, especially from an energy-consumption point of view. "We require needs-based provisioning of resources at a far more granular level, based on monitoring and sensing technology to make the IT industry self-sustaining," said Patel.

Patel added that service oriented devices relying on centralised software and networking resources, in optimised data centres, will help bring automated, remote working or energy efficient technology to both consumer and enterprise markets.

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