Reviewing The Bookshelf






Reviewing The Bookshelf – The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment
Review by Thomas “Duffbert” Duff

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Thomas Duff BOOK Review: The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment
by John Lamb
357 pages
IBM Press
ISBN: 978-0-13-715083-0

The big buzzword right now is "green." Everyone wants to have a green product or service, one that has minimal (or at least lower than normal) impact to the environment when it comes to energy consumption and resource utilization. IT is no exception, and John Lamb makes the case for green IT in his book The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment. For someone like me who has traditionally not been as environmentally aware as I could be, this was an interesting read and one that can potentially save a company millions of dollars in the process.

Contents:
Chapter 1 — The Importance of Green IT
Chapter 2 — The Basics of Green IT
Chapter 3 — Collaboration Is Key for Green IT
Chapter 4 — The Government's Rule — Regulation and EPA Activity
Chapter 5 — The Magic of "Incentive" — The Role of Electric Utilities
Chapter 6 — A Most-Significant Step — "Virtualizing" Your IT Systems
Chapter 7 — The Need for Standard IT Energy-Use Metrics
Chapter 8 — What About Chillers, Cooling Tower Fans, and All That Cooling Equipment Usually Ignored by IT?
Chapter 9 — Green IT Case Studies for Energy Utilities
Chapter 10 — Green IT Case Studies for Universities and a Large Company
Chapter 11 — Worldwide Green IT Case Studies
Chapter 12 — The Future of Green IT for Corporations
Appendix A — Green IT Checklist and Recommendations
Appendix B — Green IT and Cloud Computing
Appendix C — Comparison of Different Power-Generation Methods
Appendix D — Worldwide Electricity Costs for IT with Projections
Index
So I'll be the first to admit... The Greening of IT is not a technical book in terms of code and routines. But unless you've given it some thought, you'll be surprised at the footprint of data centers when it comes to such things as energy consumption. It's estimated that energy doubled from 2000 to 2006 to more than 61 billion kilowatt hours and could be over 100 billion by 2011. Cost? $7.4 billion annually, and that's just to run our data centers and servers! Think of the impact to the energy grid when Google opens up a new data center somewhere in the world. And the demand for more computing resources aren't going to shrink any time in the foreseeable future. While all that power might appear to be staggering and expensive, you can also see where following green practices in IT isn't just a responsible idea, but a solid contribution to the bottom line.

Lamb makes a solid case for the current situation (unbridled growth in computing needs), as well as why companies are starting to shift to a more "green" mindset. And it's not strictly a hardware solution, either. Inefficient applications that run servers at maximum capacity require more energy than do efficient applications. Maintaining single sources of data instead of allowing data duplication cuts down on storage, backup, and recovery needs. And most importantly, virtualization can take multiple machines running at a minimal capacity and consolidate them onto a single larger server that can do the same work while drawing less energy.

If you've spent time in a data center, you know how cooling needs to be present to keep all hardware running optimally. But instead of just placing equipment in rows without much rationale, Lamb shows how a green mindset can place equipment with similar cooling needs in one area or aisle separate from other equipment that generates more heat. This strategic placement can immediately lower the electrical bill. And if you live in the northern part of the US, do you REALLY need to be pumping in conditioned 60-degree air when it's 35 degrees outside? You have all the cold air you need... Why not use it?

Having your Operations Center management or senior IT leadership read this book could mean the savings of millions of dollars every year (that should keep a few more jobs around). And if you care to study up on this yourself, you might find that you've been given the opportunity to be part of a project that will have an ROI measured in months rather than years. And for you consultants out there, you might want to consider this niche area that isn't well covered for smaller businesses...

Even if you're a head-down coder, reading The Greening of IT will open your eyes to changes that either are occurring or need to occur on a daily basis wherever you work.

Review by Thomas "Duffbert" Duff

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