Stories by: Ted Samson

The prospect of disposing of old IT equipment -- PCs, servers, storage gear, and the like -- may very well fill your heart with dread. After all, you're putting a lot of faith in a third party that the machines will be thoroughly wiped of confidential information, resold for a fair price, and, when applicable, properly disassembled, recycled, and disposed of. If your partners' practices end up being sloppy -- or downright criminal -- you could find yourself in regulatory and PR hell as confidential data protected by HIPAA or SarBox ends up in the wrong hands or 500 of your PCs end up in a landfill or river somewhere.

When Energy Star 4.0 went into effect last year, it seemed to set a rather high bar for power supplies: In order for a computer to meet the standard, it needs a PSU with a minimum efficiency of 80 percent. But hardware vendor Dell already appears to have an eye on the next version of the Energy Star specification, which is slated to go into effect in July of 2009.

Interest in green technology is out there, but price remains the No. 1 barrier to wider-spread adoption, far more so than skepticism that green tech is really good for the environment. Those are among the survey findings released this week by Green Factor, a joint initiative between Strategic Oxygen, GCI Group, and Cohn and Wolfe aimed at "illuminating 'green' marketing opportunities and further[ing] 'green'-focused research on a global scale."

Organisations are investing in green computers -- that is, machines that are energy efficient and built in an environmentally responsible manner -- at ever-increasing rates. Sometimes they pay a small premium to do this. Is it worth it? They seem to think so.

Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the high costs of maintaining and cooling servers: A mid-tier $2,500 server can cost as much as $2,020 to power and cool annually, according to the Uptime Institute. Thus, demand for ways to curb those expenses is rising as well.

Measure, measure, measure: It's one of the pieces of advice repeatedly doled out to companies looking to make their datacenters more energy-efficient. Without question, it's a sound suggestion; if you don't know where you're starting from, how do you know where you should go or whether you've made any progress?

Spurred by business needs as well as environmental concerns, green IT projects blossomed in datacenters and on desktops throughout the world in 2007.

With a student population of less than 4,000, Bryant University certainly isn't the largest institution of higher learning in the United States. It's regarded as one of the most wired schools in the world, however, boasting "one port per pillow" in the dorms.

Fujitsu is by no means new to the green-tech party: Since launching a broad environmental initiative way back 1991, the company has worked diligently to reduce waste and pollutants within its operations while advancing the green features in its array of products.

Managing 14 separate, inefficiently designed datacenters spread throughout a city is difficult and costly enough. Add to that an unreliable primary energy supply that drops off frequently and abruptly, and you've got a huge headache.

Upgrading older hardware with energy-efficient components is an arguably green business choice: By extending the life of your machines rather than trading them in for brand-new ones, you reduce the world's e-waste pile -- while saving yourself some cash. Digital Realty Trust, which owns, acquires, and manages technology-related real estate worldwide, took that philosophy a step further; the company transformed part of a 90-year-old printing plant in Chicago into the world's first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold-certified datacenter facility.