To help reduce their carbon footprint, search-engine giant Google decided to scrap their lawn mowers and rent goats to munch on their lawns instead. Not only are these goats much more environmentally-friendly than lawn mowers, but as Google puts it, “goats are a lot cuter to watch!”
Softchoice hasn’t yet progressed to renting goats to do our landscaping, but we’re doing our part to take care of the environment with some other green initiatives. Being a technology provider, we know it’s important to look at how we can become more conscious of implementing more environmentally-aware practices when it comes to technology – after all, the IT industry produces the same carbon emissions as the airline industry, approximately 1 billion tonnes of Carbon Dioxide per year. While we may be excited about the technology advances we’ve seen recently (i.e. iPads, Google Maps, social media outlets), we have to be conscious of the amount of energy it takes to run the servers and infrastructure that support these tools.
Of course, while data centers can be obvious energy gorgers, there are ways that IT companies can run their centers to help reduce their carbon footprint. To find out how Softchoice is making our data center greener, I sat down with Softchoice IT Infrastructure Manager Lester Moniz. Lester explained the top 3 green IT initiatives that Softchoice has been focusing on recently: [Read more...]
Data center efficiency projects such as virtualization, consolidation, power and cooling upgrades all have pretty strong business cases and ROI. The reduction in hardware means lower operating and managing costs for your organization.
The Power Usage Effectiveness Estimator or PUE Calculator is a tool that we are going to attempt to use here at Softchoice. This tool will give us a numbered result that we can work into our reports at the end of the year and compare against future years to see how effectively we are using our power. I will post more as I learn about this tool and make sure to detail the best ways to use it. So far the most challenging part is getting a member of our IT team to sit down and help me out! Check out the tool and let me know if you have used it before or have any quicker results.
Facebook has taken recent criticism seriously about their energy consumption. They have joined their IT cohorts to do the right thing and have cleared the air in their data center by using fans to create better airflow management as well as containing this cold air to keep it escaping in the floors. This makes their systems more efficient and dramatically cuts the amount of energy they are using.
A data center in Phoenix has found a way to “freeze” their data center costs – using ice balls. The Ice Ball Thermal Storage System may be the coolest technology to hit the market…literally!
Recent Conversations