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The Greening of IT
216 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

Whether purchasing alternative green products for everyday use or tak-
ing care of business in a sustainable way, we now have the opportunity to
change for the better. I simply define better as doing operations with
less energy and creating longer lasting value. Green is all about doing
the right thing and saving costs. How can you spruce up your data cen-
ter? Here are some tips and examples of green IT users:

1. Begin with an enterprise goal in mind. Create lasting greenness.
Small scale will yield small results. Large scale will yield bigger
results. Often every project looks good and green by itself, but when
added up, a suboptimal data center and complex infrastructure has
been created. IBM has a vision that can become a green blueprint for
a data center that has state-of-the-art capabilities while using less
energy and space. The New Enterprise Data Center exploits virtual-
ization and service management with automation and aligns with
business goals. The journey of transformation includes being sim-
plified, shared, and dynamic. Start a green program with goals in
mind.
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2. Exploit virtualization to reduce the number of servers and
improve flexibility. Virtualization or using software or hypervisor
technology to represent virtual servers rather than physical servers is
a very green technology. Reducing the number of power drawing
components in the data center to a minimum directly slashes the
amount of energy consumed as well as reduces the cooling require-
ments. Logical Partitioning (LPAR) and virtualization technologies
®
such as VMware, PowerVM, and z/VM , to name a few, break the
physical boundaries of servers and drive up utilization reducing the
need for many servers. Starting with pilot or proof of concept proj-
ects is easier than ever before because IT vendor services and virtual-
ization technologies on all platforms have matured. From open
source virtualization to mainframe z/VM virtualization, both imple-
mentation services and technologies abound to start eliminating the
wasteful approaches of one server per application and a variety of
servers for every production server. Many applications can be hosted
on a physical server and still have the autonomy because of virtual-
ization. How many servers can be eliminated? Compression ratios of
1 to 8 are common, and 1 to 50 compression ratios are often
achieved with the best virtualization technologies.