“Buy your way out of CO2 gassing”

You wouldn’t believe the amount of PR being generated around green IT.

There’s some genuinely good stuff and some right old tosh. See what you think of this – especially the part about buying carbon credits to offset your emissions…I reckon there’ll be some trouble with this model.

“In 2006 the average data centre required nearly one hundred barrels of oil per day to run. In its mission to help customers reduce data centre costs and to become “greener” by also reducing energy consumption, 3PAR (www.3par.com) has created ten New Year’s resolutions for the 2007 data centre. Implementing just a few of the suggestions below could help businesses reduce operational costs by 50% or more with advanced “energy saving” technologies and creative environmental programs.

Cut storage power and cooling needs dramatically by reducing disk drive capacity requirements with Thin-Provisioning technology.

Reduce the amount of capacity required to meet data protection and disaster recovery needs with Thin Copy and Thin Replication technology.

Reduce energy consumption and power bills further by installing energy-efficient servers.
Reduce power and space consumption with virtualised server consolidation technologies like VMWare

Select vendors that utilise thermal enhancement features in their machinery such as DC-powered servers that can increase efficiency and reliability while reducing power consumption.

Transition to a true utility computing environment, built on server and storage virtualisation, to dramatically improve resource utilisation and reduce overall data centre costs and related energy consumption substantially. Simplified data centre management will be a related benefit.

Invite your local power utility to do a data centre assessment to provide you with recommendations about how you might reduce energy consumption or replace aging equipment with more energy efficient gear. Take advantage of any subsidy programs available for equipment refresh.

Cut down on long-distance travel costs and the related GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and invest the savings in video conferencing equipment or web-based conferencing services.

Adopt low-emission company cars and offer employee incentives for mass transit, carpooling, walking and cycling to work.

Purchase ‘carbon credits’ through organisations like Terrapass (www.terrapass.com) to offset the emissions you will continue to generate.”