Green Channel

The local Sun channels team is weighing up the viability of launching a green partner program in Australia.

A recent study by In-Stat says that fixed-configuration 24- and 48-port switches can vary by more than 600 per cent in terms of how much switching capacity they support in relation to how much electric power they draw.

Green IT was a major theme at Interop this week, as vendors outbid one another on how well their networking gear could lower power consumption to help save the planet.

Many discarded electronic devices in the U.S. wind up being dismantled overseas using crude and unsafe methods, partly because of a lack of markets for some electronic materials, e-waste experts told a congressional committee on Wednesday.

Xerox's research arm Monday showcased its latest innovations, including erasable paper and tools that make documents "smart" by adding a deeper meaning to words and images.

Green has never been sexier. It's the new black, and it sells.

According to IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano the client PC era is over, dead and buried, and not just because the vendor sold its Thinkpad business to Lenovo. Cloud computing is the future, and to underline the point Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt shared the keynote stage at Big Blue's partner leadership forum in the US last week.

Efforts to develop a national e-waste management scheme continue to stir up debate within the industry about where responsibility lies.

Bluetooth's low-power variant could be everywhere starting next year, and other low-power networking options had better watch out, say the new standard's backers.

It is imperative that businesses quickly recognize the need for environmentally sound behaviors and good business practices to co-exist, Nortel President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Zafirovski said today at FORTUNE's first-ever Brainstorm: GREEN Conference** in Pasadena, Calif.

Rackspace provides datacentre facilities under a managed hosting scheme. It is building a new UK datacentre and has had a green aspect to its business for about a year and a half. How is that affecting its operations?

APC founder and CTO Neil Rasmussen was in London recently to talk about datacentres, power and efficiency - themes that have become headline news as they transmogrify into green issues. We took the opportunity to ask him - inter alia - whether the datacentre can ever be green.

In the second part of an in-depth interview with ARN's BRIAN CORRIGAN, IBM's Andrew Baker, talks about partner opportunities, the environment and Dell in the channel.

In the second part of an in-depth interview with ARN's Brian Corrigan, local Kyocera Mita managing director, David Finn, talks about the printer-maker's green credentials.

In the final part of an in-depth interview with ARN's Brian Corrigan, local Lenovo managing director, talks about environmental and social responsibility.

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?

The IT industry must smooth the transition path if CIOs are to stop thinking of green initiatives as an inconvenience.

I remember when I started in this industry with IBM, a key sales strategy was to create FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt -- in the minds of our customers. The idea was that if we covered prospective customers with a thick layer of FUD, going with the 'big, safe' IBM would be an easy and logical decision. In those days 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' was the subtle subtext in IT decision making.

Doing the right thing makes sense from a business point of view as well as from an environmental and corporate social responsibility perspective.

You may very well prefer to postpone the task of refreshing your fleet of desktop systems and monitors, an exercise that can be both expensive and time-consuming. But inevitably, machines break down or your needs change, so you have to bite the bullet.