As the day-to-day use of ICT continues to rise, concern is growing about the carbon emissions indirectly caused by the manufacture of the electronics that litter our lives and the steady rise in the electricity required to power our personal devices and data centres. However, the debate should be less about ICT’s tiny contribution to global warming and more about how ICT can be used to reduce carbon emissions across society.
Back in February this year I tool part in one of a series of video debates on green IT hosted by the BCS as one of four “industry experts”. The topic was “IT policies and your green credentials”. Watch the video here…
The Government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme aims to reduce absolute carbon dioxide emissions from large non-energy intensive organisations in both the public and private sector. In this article I discuss the impact of the CRC on data centres and why it will likely be counter-productive in the context of reducing carbon emissions.
The British Computer Society’s Data Centre Specialist Group has released a beta version of their data centre cost and energy simulator to members of the specialist group. The simulator has come out of the Carbon Trust’s Low Carbon Collaboration initiative jointly funded by BCS and Romonet. Here are my first impressions from the preview a few weeks ago.
This post has now been superseded by my updated
People keep going around and around in circles on the debate of whether you should replace servers and desktops sooner rather than later when you take into account the improvements in energy efficiency in recent years combined with the embedded energy cost of manufacture of computers. So, I decided to get out my calculator and [...]
I will be carrying on with the “Greening the data centre” series soon, but in the interim several people have recently been asking me about the concept of utility computing, and it has been a major theme of recent IT conferences. Despite the attention the concept is receiving there is still a lot of misunderstanding, [...]
I’ve written before about going green being important for business, but now I’d to focus on one area: the data centre. There has been a lot of interest recently in the topic of “green” data centres. however, many organisations still seem to feel that being more energy efficient in is just pandering to the general [...]
When temperatures rise to record levels, it’s not just trains and water supplies that go wrong; all sorts of infrastructure can be affected including the Internet.
Normally our data centres have plenty of over-capacity in their air-conditioning systems. Cooling a data centre is one of their big design challenges – each of our 1 metre square [...]
“So, do you use Cisco firewalls as well as routers?”, asks the client; “No, actually.” is our response. Why, you might ask? Surely if you are running over a thousand servers and managing hundreds of individual firewalls you must be using Cisco or some other branded “firewall appliance”? But why must we?
What is [...]