And finally... Green IT.
I've heard a lot of people banging on about Green IT in the last year or so and, in actual fact, I personally am responsible for some of that banging. I have always thought that virtualisation, as a concept, is fantastic in itself in lowering carbon emissions by reducing power consumption and so on but I must admit I had never considered the impact to be that huge. That was until I saw the Green IT speech by Reed Managed Services.
They reckon they are the largest 64-bit Citrix user in the UK and have recently won a "Green Oscar", whatever that is. Instead of what used to be 29 users on average on a blade, they can now get up to 100.
Add in a whole host of WYSE terminals, which use 12 watts of power instead of 75 with a PC, and a virtualised server infrastructure using VMWare (only because XenServer wasn't around 2 years ago of course) and Reed not only made their company completely carbon-neutral but saved 26% of their IT budget in the process. Which I thought was pretty impressive.
The speaker also suggested many other ways that IT manufacturers can further reduce carbon footprints such as using smaller packaging, implementing fewer delivery drops into the shipping process, providing 100% recyclable packaging and removing instruction manuals completely and just putting them online instead. Apparently it's possible to get 99% of packaging to be recyclable currently. The other 1% is the bubble wrap. One bright spark in the audience suggested we put CO2 in the bubbles, which I thought was quite amusing.
I think I'll bang on about Green IT a bit more now.
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