Environmental concerns have gained significant traction in the last decade and organisations are acutely aware of their roles and contributions toward the society. In the wake of a worldwide debate over a range of environmental concerns such as global warming, water shortages, E-waste, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions etc., Information and Communications Technology (ICT) enterprises are frenetically racing to meet their green goals. Flip through any of the annual sustainability reports to find the “environment” section showcasing a bevy of Green IT initiatives that reveal the stats on carbon footprint, waste recycling, GHG emissions, energy savings and so forth. Initiatives that address environmental issues take the top spot in the corporate strategies of IT firms.
IT ENTERPRISES AND GREEN TECH
Green IT is an agenda of every enterprise seeking to lower carbon footprint, improve Power Usage Efficiencies (PUE) and reduce waste with the goal of lowering the Total Cost to the Environment (TCE). Green IT encompasses water, E-waste, business travel, electricity, printing, and IT operations. It entails the possibilities of deploying technologies that reduce computing requirements through optimal use of the IT hardware architecture.
As enterprises plan greener or environmentally friendly IT infrastructures, the arrival of resource saving technology marks the shift away from setting up large scale physical infrastructures with the objective of reducing TCO and TCE. Though cloud has become a major phenomenon, it is a fact that many IT enterprises are still working towards reducing the impact on the environment by designing resource saving IT architectures for the years ahead.
In view of the environmental challenges, enterprises are setting up new-age data centres with a keen focus on protecting the environment. An example of resource saving technological concepts is the use of sustainable alternatives such as virtualisation and cloud computing with the help of partners or innovators such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Both virtualisation and cloud computing are core elements of an overarching green IT strategy for enterprises worldwide.
VIRTUALISATION AS GREEN IT
Virtualisation offers ideal utilisation of hardware for optimising power consumption in datacentres. Instead of deploying various physical servers, enterprises are leveraging the server virtualisation concept to meet the computing demands of users and the benefits are phenomenal. Several hundreds of servers are virtually run on a few physical servers by sharing computing resources. Virtualisation extends to PCs also for running multiple virtual machines on one single machine. There is no denying that virtualisation reduces drastically the need for more physical space, cooling appliances and power supply; the other benefit is that it increases rapidly the flexibility and uptime of IT applications. Hence, by freeing up spaces, reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, virtualisation proves to be a cost effective and sustainable alternative.
“There is no denying that virtualisation reduces drastically the need for more physical space, cooling appliances and power supply; the other benefit is that it increases rapidly the flexibility and uptime of IT applications. Hence, by freeing up spaces, reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, virtualisation proves to be a cost effective and sustainable alternative.”
– Satyanarayanan Visvanathan, Senior VP & Head,
HR (Global) and Head, Corporate Quality, CSS Corp