Green Products

Greening your business has short-term effects that will save you money, let employees breathe better, and maybe even help land you a few more customers. These tips, sites, and kits can help your business go green for 2012.

Since January, David Filas, a data center engineer at Trinity Health, has been running decommissioned servers, networking gear and storage systems in a simple generator shed on the grounds of the healthcare provider's headquarters in Novi, Mich.

Well, last week's Backspin on Rossi's E-Cat power generator was fun. Between that column and a blog posting I made on the topic over at Forbes, I've had more than 100 comments and an insane number of page views which all goes to show just what a hot topic alternative energy is.

Most impressive was the tour through the zero carbon household that Panasonic has designed to show off to visitors.

Data center managers are well versed in distributing power efficiently to physical servers. But the proliferation of virtualization, with multiple virtual machines and applications running on a single piece of hardware, has made this task a lot more complicated.

Servers get most of the glory when it comes to energy management, but networking gear is about to catch up.

At Storage Networking World a couple of weeks ago, the focus was on solid-state drives and cloud technologies.

Sixty-five percent of consumers think some companies overstate their green credentials to sell more products, according to research presented by industry organization Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday.

A number of cool and weird items are on display at the International Consumer Electronics Show, including a money-saving surge protector and a pair of goggles that double as a mobile TV.

Do it for the money. If you still think you know better than some of the brightest scientific and economic minds in the world, and the overwhelming majority of researchers who have spent more time on the climate change issue than anyone else, then at least save yourself and your clients some coin.

The IT industry is responsible for a great number of products that contribute to the global greenhouse gas emissions problem. In response, many vendors are now looking at re-architecting their goods and striving to find ways to improve energy efficiency and social responsibility while retaining quality.

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?

Evidence is mounting of a growing cynicism regarding green initiatives within the IT infrastructure space. We may be reaching a point where vendor hype has hit a saturation point and beginning to meet with customer resistance. While there is a genuine concern about data center power consumption, particularly with regard to accommodating increasingly dense technology footprints, the larger concern for most, particularly in the current climate, is controlling costs.

Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons for companies to go green. The first is to reduce energy costs, thereby saving the company money. As one IT executive put it to me recently, "Green computing is all about saving greenbacks."

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.

IBM BladeCenter JS12 Express