Green IT gets the green light

Everybody is talking green this year, and the computer industry is no exception. We’re hearing about programs to recycle computers, peripherals and batteries, about chips that use less power, about improved power supplies and about saving energy through server virtualization, to name the main ones. Consulting firm Deloitte named green tech as one of the top trends for 2007.This is good. We can’t keep wasting resources and polluting the way we have. It’s fine to talk about economic impacts, but we can’t have a healthy economy if we’re all dead.But a lot of what we’re hearing now is just lip service, and that applies to everyone from the vendors to the IT departments to the end users. We all want to do well by doing good. We like the idea of reducing energy consumption, but we like it more because we hope it will cut our costs. Many IT people are very interested in servers that use less power, but the environment isn’t their primary motivation. Even if it were, they’d have trouble getting budget to invest in reducing power consumption if the results didn’t show up on the bottom line.Enterprises want to use their data centres to use less power, but it’s not because they’re worried about the ozone layer. In fact, in many cases it’s even not so much because of the savings on the power itself. It’s also because for every kilowatt of power consumed by the computers in a data centre, the air conditioning system uses at least another kilowatt getting rid of the heat thus generated. And in a fair number of cases, they just can’t get any more power into those data centres.So in the end, the motivation for virtualizing servers and seeking out more energy-efficient hardware is financial, not environmental. At least the end result is energy savings.Recycling is tougher. It makes economic sense to keep using old equipment if it’s still good for anything, and to sell it if you can get any money for it, but once it’s past those options, the cheapest way to get rid of it is still to toss it in a dumpster. Fortunately, more vendors are launching programs to take back old gear for recycling. Sony recently announced free recycling of all its products in the U.S. Computer makers are taking back hardware. Cellphone and printer makers recycle ink cartridges, batteries and phones. All good. Still, it would be even better to make the stuff last longer in the first place. Printer manufacturers still discourage ink-cartridge refills. Many printers have problems with refilled cartridges, such as continuing to flag them as empty. Designing cartridges for ­refilling would be better environmentally, but replace­ment car­tridges are where the money is. Kudos to hardware vendors for recycling old hardware. But why is the average life expectancy of a PC still less than five years? Software is as much to blame as hardware – its performance degrades until the only solution is to reinstall – and then, typically, you end up installing a new version of Windows that requires more resources, so unless you also upgrade the hardware, performance is no better. So most of us just replace the PC. It shouldn’t have to be that way, and if we ever get serious about green technology, it won’t be.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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