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Green IT gaining importance, says HP

Saving the planet and saving money go hand in hand, according to HP.

By Benny Har-Even in Chantilly, France, 27 Jan 2009 at 12:18

Green IT is moving higher up the agenda than ever before, according to HP, as it unveiled its ProCurve networking initiative.

Ben van Kerkwyk, the global product manager for HP’s ProCurve, told IT PRO that the programme reflected an increasing focus on green IT in enterprise computing.

“Companies spend the same on cooling in the data centre as they do on electronics, so naturally there’s a large trend to optimise. You could say it’s a green initiative in every sense of the word,” said Kerkwyk, hinting at the green of company dollars as much as green in the environmental sense of the word.

“Our new 6600 switches offer front-to-back cooling, as opposed to side-to-side. It enables data centres to optimise for smart cooling. We can also turn off unused ports on our switches as even when not being used they can used a couple of watts of power," he claimed. "Also, our SFP+ interconnects are much lower power than standard fibre connections.”

He said that while networking accounts for only 10 per cent of the cooling costs of a data centre it all adds up. “There’s been a fundamental shift in utility costs,” he said, referencing difficult global conditions.

Much of what HP has put into its new products has come from its own experiences, Kerkwyk said. “We reduced more than 80 data centres down to six, and heavily reduced the number of applications we ran. We’re one of the biggest IT shops in the world and we learned a lot from our own experiences.”

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Ethical asset register is key to green IT

IT is being used more and more by businesses to cut back on their carbon footprints. Great efforts are being made by organisations to use solutions such as video-conferencing and VOIP all in a bid to save energy and prove their green credentials. However, increasing pressure for green credentials will create a significant cost for UK business unless organisations get their asset registers in order. Existing green policies such as the WEEE directive and measuring carbon footprints assume a level of asset management far beyond that achieved by the majority of UK business. By linking the asset register to a document management system organisations can create the required audit trail, gaining valuable insight into their own assets and adapting to the ‘green economy’. Businesses should be taking more responsibility for ethically and environmentally sound disposal of WEEE and there’s no excuse for flouting the legislation when using the asset register makes compliance so straightforward. Even with complex legislation, there is a very simple way of dealing with it –through the fixed asset register. Without a consistent, corporate wide approach to recording comprehensive fixed asset information, organisations will not be able to report upon their asset performance – from carbon emissions to recycling figures. It is only by capturing increasing detail about an asset’s lifecycle that organisations can begin to provide the corporate visibility required to underpin CSR strategies. Yours faithfully, Karen Conneely Group Commercial Manager Real Asset Management Central Court Knoll Rise Orpington Kent BR6 0JA www.realassetmgt.com

By Ip_clairel2adbaa on Tuesday Jan 27

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