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14 14 P a r t I : a r t I : T r e n d s a n d R e a s o n s t o G o G r e e nr e n d s a n d R e a s o n s t o G o G r e e n

a cinder with no atmosphere. Oh yeah, we’d also like to avoid getting cancer from drinking
groundwater. But even if you have absolutely no interest in helping the environment, the
changes in business processes, practices, and behavior outlined in this book can have an
overwhelmingly positive impact on your business.
Can a company be green and churn a healthy profit? Are these two concepts contradictory?
Not at all. Even better, not only are they not contradictory, one actually builds on the other. By
lessening your organization’s impact on the environment, you’re going to spend more—at first.
After that, you save money—you save a lot of money.
The number-one reason businesses either decide to go green or are prevented from going
green is cost. Unless equipment is planned to be replaced or there’s a datacenter design in the
works, most businesses aren’t likely to replace their equipment just for the sake of duty to
society. But when the cost of power starts taking a bigger and bigger bite out of the IT budget,
organizations start really looking at green computing, according to research by Forrester.

Hardware
There are a number of ways that specific hardware and hardware deployments can affect
the environment—and your bottom line. The biggest way you can reduce your impact on
the environment and the amount of money you’re paying for hardware is to simply buy less
equipment. We’ll talk more about virtualization in Chapter 12, but let’s talk a little about the
benefits to reducing the amount of hardware you use.
Taking the Steps, Reaping the Rewards
Consider the savings that Nashville’s Vanderbilt University and the state of Oregon are
going to experience. Both groups have begun datacenter virtualization projects (as of early
2008) and expect to save millions of dollars by the time the projects are finished.
Vanderbilt’s Information Technology Services organization is using server virtualization
to reduce its energy use. By reducing the number of physical servers they’re using, they
save money and they do less damage to the environment. They have virtualized 35 percent
of the servers they manage, which is the equivalent of saving 20,575 watts per hour. The
organization’s goal is to get up to 80 percent virtualization on its servers.
The state of Oregon is taking on an even bigger project. It is combining 11 separate state
agency datacenters by June 2009. The centers will be combined into a new center in the state
capital, Salem, and will combine both servers and storage. The project costs US$43 million
up front, but will save US$12 million per year after that, and will reduce power consumption
by up to 35 percent.
Use What You Have
Although purchasing new, energy-efficient equipment is a good idea, it’s only a good idea if
you actually need new equipment. If you have old computers that can be repurposed, you’ve
just administered a one-two punch. You don’t have to recycle anything and you don’t have
to spend money on something new.
For instance, you can take an older computer and turn it into a thin client. With a thin
client, the processing and storage duties are conducted at the server. The client just needs
enough power to be able to display what is going on at the server.
If you don’t like the idea of having old equipment in use—even as a thin client—consider
still using the thin-client model, just buy new thin clients. On average, a thin client uses 15 watts
of energy instead of the 150 watts that workstations use, as shown next. If you deploy them
across your organization, your energy bill will be ten times less than what it is now.