Abstract— Information Technology (IT) is at the heart of every
successful modern business. IT is so pervasive, that energy
efficiency through the implementation of green IT has moved to
center stage for many companies in their pursuit of helping make
a difference for the environment. This paper provides an
overview on the importance of implementing green IT, the
significant and growing role of IT and data centers in the world’s
consumption of electric energy and carbon footprint, and the
significance of using “lessons learned” and best practice
approaches for implementing green IT.
Green IT is an ideal way for most companies to make a
significant step in the green direction for several reasons. First,
IT is continually being refreshed as a matter of company policy in
order for the company to remain competitive. That refresh cycle
is similar to the refresh cycle for our company owned laptops, i.e.
every three or four years. Thus, even for a moderately sized
company, servers and data storage are continually being
replaced. Replacing the IT equipment and upgrading the
application architecture with energy efficient systems such as
virtual servers, virtual data storage, and efficient application and
database structures, can easily reduce IT power consumption for
the replaced equipment by 50 percent. A second compelling
reason to move to green IT is that virtual server and virtual data
storage technology are methods to allow you to reduce equipment
and system management costs for your data center. Include
private cloud computing for most of your test / development
systems and the savings are even greater. So data center green
technology is based around a very solid business case without
even considering the savings due to reduction in energy costs.
Green IT, Green data centers, and the use of cloud computing for
energy efficiency are hot-topics, worldwide. IDC forecasts that
for every $1 spent on hardware, power and cooling will consume
$1 by 2012. This paper describes power issues at data centers in
South Africa based on the author’s recent experience. The
solutions to these power issues include virtualization of servers
and data storage. Cloud computing has become the ultimate way
to virtualize IT resources and to save energy. Case study benefits
of using private clouds, especially for test and development
systems, at companies in South Africa are described.