GREEN IT — But how? Many organizations today find itself under extreme pressure to institute new process that enables smooth implementations of Green IT initiatives. While cost and ROI are the key to making a decision, a major contributing factor for the CIO’s to make informed decisions is the lack of a clear consensus on the scope and detail of the project. The options are aplenty – Virtualization, Data Center Consolidation, thin clients etc., however the resulting ROI - Is it justified?
This paper explores all the options and provides a comparison; the resulting benefits from the recommended option are an excellent ROI, substantial energy savings and zero e-waste.
Computing was never as complicated as what it is today. Computers have found a place in most of the living rooms, leave alone the workplace. Desktop computing has become a standard in many organizations and CIO’s are challenged with the complexity of running their IT organization covering a wide spectrum of technologies, like Servers, data centers, redundancy, Disaster Recovery, telecommunication, and desktop management.
Specific to Desktop computing, organizations have the constant challenge of fighting anti-obsolescence, keeping software investments low, maintaining high security and protecting data threat, to name a few.
End point solutions on security, threat control, management and other business specific needs are being addressed on a continuous basis by the CIO’s team. The IT team is forced to focus now on the day-to-day computing tasks leaving little time for them to take their IT growth in a more strategic direction aligning to the business needs. With this scenario, going green is an initiative that has to be driven mainly by the CIO’s team, where they are already gasping for time.
Going the Green IT way is a matter of utmost urgency today to most organizations, may not be due to the global pressure on climate change considerations but, most importantly today a very important cost saving measure.
Organizations have put together plans to go green with lean data centers, virtualization and other technology implementations. It is surely an important milestone as far as going green on the data centers are concerned, because the cost of reduction in servers is probably not the major money saver, but the cost of electricity for cooling the data center and the real estate associated with it is! The return on investment from the data center migration to virtualization is approximately 2-3 years, taking the cost of recurring electricity costs on cooling and saving on real estate.
Data centers and servers contribute 10-15% of cost of electricity from computing. So where is the balance cost of electricity on computing? It may be hard to believe, but it is a fact that it is the desktop computing which is consuming close to 85%-90% of the cost towards electricity.
So what can CIO’s do to reduce this cost? Of course there are very many methods recommended and being practiced. A small attempt is made to discuss some of the options that organizations have, their pros and cons, finally summarized with a table that can help in deciding the way forward for going green on desktop computing.
