Green Channel: Interviews

Once upon a time, the idea of using expensive, environmentally-friendly IT was expected to flop in the harsh world of business. But fast-forward to 2009 and green technology has leapt off the drawing boards into the realm of profitability.

Juniper Networks datacentre solutions director, Bobby Guhasarkar, spoke with ARN about where the datacentre is headed and the way market conditions affect strategy.

Steady, incremental improvement has been the name of the game for Datacom, and is what led to the service provider winning the ARN Green Project of the Year award for the second time in a row.

Big companies carry big responsibilities in leading the green push in IT. And that responsibility is something IBM takes very seriously.

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.

What was your first IT job?

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26 percent per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200 percent annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

Saving on energy costs is obviously a good thing, but to Larry Quinlan, CIO at the consulting firm Deloitte, green IT simply makes good business sense. "If you run green IT right, you will end up with a vastly superior IT organization," Quinlan said during his keynote address at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in the US, in which he described green IT as one of five technologies that will change IT. From reducing demand for IT resources to thin laptops, Quinlan has no shortage of ideas on how to make green IT deliver on multiple fronts.

The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop/s, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Tell us about the AIIA’s Byteback program.