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CHAPTER

Overview and Issues

he protagonist in the classic children’s fable “Chicken Little” would annoy his fellow
chickens by constantly insisting that “the sky is falling,” when it never was. It was the
Tsame sort of deal with the Shepherd Boy in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” It all ended
badly for Chicken Little and the Shepherd Boy, and we run the risk of a similar scenario
playing itself out where green computing is concerned.
We’ve heard so much about global warming; we’ve heard so much about being eco-
friendly; we’ve seen so many “Think Globally, Act Locally” bumper stickers on VW vans;
and Al Gore can’t keep himself from talking about the environment. Put simply, we get
bombarded by the message so much that it’s easy to ignore. But the truth of the matter is that
if we don’t heed the warnings, the sky will fall and we’ll be praying for wolves to eat us.
Being green means different things to different people. Ask ten Chief Information
Officers (CIOs) what “being green” means, and you’ll get ten different answers. A lot of it
depends on what CIOs are particularly interested in. For some, it might mean buying
technology that’s more energy efficient than what they have. Another might suggest that it’s
an issue of reducing the amount of electricity a datacenter consumes. For others, it means
buying hardware that is made of environmentally friendly components. Yet others might
look at the end of hardware life and suggest that Green IT means proper disposal.
Who’s right? They all are. Green IT is a combination of all these issues. To be sure, if you
make it your mission to tackle just one of these issues, you’re doing a good thing for both
your organization and the environment. But the more of these issues you go after, the better.
Green IT is a complex subject, and it might be tough to decide how to tackle the greening of
your organization’s IT interests. The global green mantra is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” No
matter what we do, if we can just keep these ideas at the front of our minds in all our Green
IT decisions, we’ll be in good shape. But the best advice is to just get started.

Problems
Chances are this isn’t the first time you’ve heard about the need to go green as it relates to
your IT infrastructure. But even though the message is out there, not enough organizations
are acting on it.
Symantec Corp. released a study that revealed almost 75 percent of datacenter managers
do, in fact, have an interest in adopting a strategic green center initiative, but only one in
seven has actually done so—Symantec, October 2007.

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