ITPRO

Printed from www.itpro.co.uk

Register to receive our regular email newsletter at http://www.itpro.co.uk/registration.

The newsletter contains links to our latest IT news, product reviews, features and how-to guides, plus special offers and competitions.

Skip to navigation

    IT key to greener world

World Wildlife Foundation says that technology has a bigger role to play in helping reduce carbon emissions than just increasing the energy efficiency of IT equipment and data centres.

By Miya Knights in Barcelona, 18 Mar 2008 at 17:42

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.

Email to a friend

Print this page

Social Bookmark this article: What is this?

Be the first to comment on this article

You need to Login or Register to comment.

advertisement

    Latest Server Features

Open source

Strip mining of open source

Strip mining of open source can be interpreted as the appropriation of free software code for proprietary gain with no intention of feeding code changes back to the community. Open source software developers beware...

Read more

 
advertisement

    Latest News Videos in Server

Video: Steve Murphy, Hitachi Data Systems

Play Video: Steve Murphy, Hitachi Data Systems   Play

IT PRO speaks to Steve Murphy, UK Managing Director of storage technology specialist Hitachi Data Systems.

 

    White papers

Want more background on today's hottest IT trends?

Visit IT PRO's white paper library for more on virtualisation, encryption and other topics.

    Register for IT PRO

You'll get exclusive member benefits including free white papers, downloads, Webinars and weekly newsletters full of the latest IT PRO news, reviews, insight and expertise.

Sponsored results

  • Tiscali Green Lifestyle, Motoring, Money and Shopping Skip to page content | Access Keys you can use to find your way around the site, skip directly to the main navigation, to the page content, or to...
    http://www.tiscali.co.uk/green/
  • It is my dream to play for Barcelona, says Adebayor| Sport | This is London for £80,000 a week to stay with Arsenal. the Togo striker, but it seems interest fromplayer who could say no to Barcelona. I don't know if it...
    http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/sport/article-234...
Advertisement