How Deloitte's IT team has gone green

You're building a new data center in Dallas. What are some of the green initiatives you're implementing there?

One is reducing power consumption. There are several standards you use to get a building LEED-certified [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a Green Building Rating System developed by the US Green Building Council] and we're implementing those standards. They cover how we deal with power, for example, and the concept of using water-cooling technology to ensure less heat emission is something that's important to us. We want to reduce the number of file severs from the very beginning by at least 20 percent compared to existing implementations. We'll use blade server technology as opposed to normal servers, so it will be all blades. We're reducing backup tapes and then also dealing with data-center waste and disposal, partnering with companies that will take our e-waste and dispose of it appropriately or recycle it. That includes any computers that weren't leased or aren't going back to vendors, peripherals and so forth.

Data center was one of four components of your green IT initiative, along with office computing, education and awareness as well as user computing. Let's start with the user computing initiative — what does that entail?

We've got a PDA recycling program where we ask people to bring in their old PDAs, so they don't end up in landfills. Pretty soon we're going to require that they bring in their old PDA to get a new one. Virtualization of laptops is another area. One of the questions we're asking ourselves is: Do we have an opportunity to virtualize laptops and, by using resources in the data center, have 45,000-plus laptops draw less power? Can we move to much thinner devices? Because we'll have ubiquity of communications, we'll always be connected. So can we have devices that are more energy efficient, while at the same time not have to worry about how to manage software and patching and all of those things? If we can pull that off, that'd be another perfect example of green IT concepts resulting in a more cost-effective IT organization. But I think it will be at least a couple of years before we can convert laptops into just thin devices accessing the network.

I understand you're also looking at energy efficient screensavers?

Those are relatively small things, but for 45,000 laptops, rolling out screensavers that turn the monitors off will save some power. Another idea is using laptop power management software that spins down the screen and the hard drive. There's a big difference between 45,000 laptops spinning down the drives after five minutes of non-use as opposed to 20 minutes.