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2: The Basics of Green IT 25

Here are some ways to start:

■ Replace paper forms with e-forms in business processes.
■ Increase automation to achieve more with less environmental impact.
■ Model and then automate processes and workflows to gain end-to-end
process visibility.
■ Take advantage of SOA to dynamically allocate and optimize workloads
across servers and applications.
■ Leverage charge-back accounting for services consumed.
■ Address environmental regulatory requirements.

There are two important areas for optimizing workloads. First, the
business workload is defined by the business process activities your
organization performs daily. This business workload is represented by
the multiple business processes that utilize people and consume energy
for each process execution. Understanding your business processes as
well as the location of critical and expensive steps in their sequencing
ptg
enables you to redesign and automate your processes or activities with a
focus on reducing energy consumption. The second focus of workload
optimization is the applications and systems that support the business
processes. The hundreds or thousands of software applications that run
every day to support your business or organization indirectly have a car-
bon footprint associated with them. Applications utilize resources and,
therefore, drive energy consumption and CO2 emissions. For additional
details on how software and business process can contribute to green IT,
use this URL: http://www.306.ibm.com/software/solutions/green/.

Green IT Is More Than Data Centers—
Your Laptop Is Included

Although servers and data centers are the focus of this book, it is
important to remember that green IT also includes your laptop. When
traveling with a laptop, we always need to be concerned about battery life.
So, we happily configure the power management functions to power off
the screen after 15 minutes and let the laptop go to “sleep” mode after
30 minutes of inactivity. Our motivation is to conserve the battery
when we’re not plugged in. However, use of sleep mode is a good green