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12

The Future of Green IT

for Corporations

“What’s past is prologue.”

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

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The future of green IT is being shaped now—based on university, corpo-
rate, and government research, regulations, incentives, and so forth. Because
of the dynamic aspect of IT, we have already made significant progress with
green computing and can build on that past. This chapter gives a summary of
what we have discussed in the preceding eleven chapters and takes a look at
the future of green IT.
For success with green IT, it needs to continue to be a collaborative
endeavor. The IT hardware and software manufacturers (Dell, Sun, HP, IBM,
Fujitsu-Siemens, Intel, EMC, Microsoft, and so on) have a great deal of com-
petitive incentive to market and improve the energy-efficiency aspects of
their products. Energy utilities, government regulators, environmental advo-
cates, and the groups involved in helping build data centers—including the
infrastructure technology providers—all need to collaborate with IT
providers and IT customers.
One of the most important arenas for development of green IT is that we
must have better measurements to better manage energy use at data centers
and throughout the corporation. We will see great strides here: for example,
like gas mileage monitoring on the Toyota Prius hybrid. Currently, we can

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