Green Channel

In senior management circles the word ‘crisis’ is not one to be bandied about lightly, especially in front of journalists. But when you hear it slipping out in private conversations and on the edges of high-level meetings you know something has to be amiss. For Australian datacentres the word is increasingly being tied to the availability of power, or more aptly the lack of it.

HP saw potential in used water bottles. Hewlett-Packard found a way to turn those old bottles, along with other types of recyclable consumer plastics, into ink-jet printer cartridges.

Jonathan Snyder's five-person team at Dreambuilder Investments isn't your typical IT organization. Or is it?

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

Some channel players have already adopted green business practices and are now driving them into their customer environments.

Awareness of the impact IT has on the environment is growing rapidly but, as with all matters of public concern, government has a lead role to play in setting an example.

Fulfilling the demand for broadband to millions of users across the globe takes more than just ingenuity, it takes energy -- lots of it. Accounting for nearly 1 per cent of total power consumption in the UK alone, BT Group was faced with a dilemma: how to scale and roll out new services to take advantage of new market opportunities without overburdening its energy budget -- and the climate.

Some enterprises have found ways to ensure their technology investments provide both environmental benefit and a quick return on investment.

Pushing telepresence as a way to cut the cost of corporate travel isn't working too well so the industry is looking to promote the video/audio technology as a way for businesses to embrace green principles, according to speakers at a recent telepresence conference.

A white paper released Tuesday from International Data (IDC) revised earlier estimates by the research firm to show that by 2011, the amount of electronic data created and stored will grow 10 times the 180 exabytes that existed in 2006, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of almost 60 per cent.

There is no topic hotter than global warming. After all, Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in raising awareness, his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar, and terms like "carbon footprint" are now part of the common lexicon.