e5rebel's story links

IT directors are tired of green marketing messages and want proper benchmarks to evaluate products. The greenest thing they can do though is sweat their assets according to a leading UK government green IT leader.

The UK government's top CIO blasts the industry at an important Green IT event. Good read.

We all need to support teh use of Open Source thin-client solutions in an educational context. Its worth stating, again, what is really the blindingly obvious - thin-client work stations use one twentieth of the power of a typical PC (10-20 watts versus 200-400 watts), require no maintenance or technical per-machine support.

Utility companies are increasingly concerned about the power crisis facing large organisations and in the US this week they have met to discuss the actions and incetnives needed to get IT organisations to take the issue seriously.

CeBIT, the world's largest IT trade show, is going green this year, with the Climate Savers Computing Initiative playing a central role.

Top retailer Marks and Spencer and leading charity Oxfam are incentivising recycling. Major IT suppliers have recycling schemes for their old kit, but we haven't seen them offer substantial rebates for doing so. Its about time they did.

Virtualisation is simply the ability to pool computing resources so that can be accessed by many devices and services. Using virtualisation you can drive up computer utilisation from 15% or capacity to nearer 90%. The green benefits are obvious.

Bit of a dig here about Apple's trendy new laptop and why Apple might not be as good for the environment as hety would like us ot believe they are now.

"Apple is not a leader on a greener market, it's just catching up, making small careful steps where giant ones are needed and projecting the small ones on a big screen to make them look bigger than they really are..."

IBM is getting its developers to create "green code" - that means building software products that focus on efficiency. Another sign that green is not just good for the environment but encourages good design that we can all benefit from.

What is claimed to be the first public document to look at the energy demands of IT products and services and set out a plan to cut IT’s carbon footprint has been published by Intellect, the UK tech industry’s trade association.

Sun saves 11,000 trees a year with paperless annual reports. Other Fortune 500 companies please take note...

Data centres use more power per square foot than any other part of the IT estate but, as a percentage of total power consumption, office equipment is the place where the most gains can be made. This is how ot do it.

The IT industry's biggest trade show is going green and being fully supporting the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. But wouldn't everyone be bettter off staying at home and if you must, using the Internet to get the info you need?

Microsoft, with 70,000 employees spread out across the world, is deep into a corporate-wide evaluation of how it can become a more environmentally friendly corporation.

The effort encompasses hardware, software, datacentres and Microsoft's role as a corporate citizen. The hope is to initiate Microsoft's people, products and programmes into the green revolution.

IBM has announced the Green Retail Store portfolio, a range of more energy-efficient IT products that handle all aspects of retailing, from the shop floor to the back office.

IBM, Nokia, Sony and bulk-mailing equipment manufacturer Pitney-Bowes have together donated patents to the Eco-patent Commons, an organisation set up to share the patents for technology with environmental benefits.

The Twitter social networking service often kicks off great discussions, including one about carbon footprints and corporate travel between Craig Cmehil and Alan Wood. This has been tidied up as a guest post for greenmonk, to illustrate the great grassroots conversations about economic greening occuring on social networks. It is well worth a read...

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, HP said that to reach its goal it would cut energy usage by by 25% by integrating power saving technologies and processes, including more efficient power supplies and lower-energy chipsets. The company plans on making the changes across its entire PC

Energy use is rapidly becoming a major concern for business and computers are increasingly seen as a major power guzzler. Energy saving measures in IT can be implemented with a minimum of cost and disruption to normal operation. This article gives some good advice on how.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child project has broken his silence and slammed Intel for its decision last week to withdraw from the organisation’s board of directors, claiming they contributed nothing to the project to deliver cheap, green compupters to poverty striken children.

Chip giant refuses requests to kill OLPC rival Classmate PC, leaving project struggling.

group of more than 90 current and former residents of Endicott, New York launched legal action against IBM on 3 January, alleging that the company's manufacturing operations in the area caused decades of environmental contamination that made them sick.

Major vendors in the IT server industry have banded together to create a new standard for measuring the relation of power consumption to performance. This is a major step forward for end user who want a realistic measure of the power/efficiency ration of rival products. It should be agreat help to all those who want to buy green and who have to justify the financial cost of doing so.

Why is it the only people that don't seem to get the urgency of the climate change situation are our elected leaders? Avaaz is a lobbying group, and this is a good petition

http://www.avaaz.org/en/

Nearly nine in ten European firms see a conflict between the regulations set out by national governments and the European Union, and 89% view green compliance as a "financial burden", according to the research conducted by research firm Coleman Parkes....

There is a great short video of the launch of Global Action Plan's pathbreaking study of the understanding of the IT industry's understanding of the green agenda and what they are going to do about it. Hard facts, people determined to do better and even some grounds for optimism...

The video is on the right hand side of the page - scroll down.

Dell, UK local authorities, retailers... people are acting on the green message.

Despite growing awareness of the need to adopt more environmentally friendly IT practices, a quarter of firms (26%) admit to having done next to nothing to green their IT, according a PMP Research study commissioned by the Evaluation Centre.

Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower Blackbox self-contained computing facilities into a Japanese coalmine to set up an underground datacentre, using up to 50% less power than a ground-level datacentre.

The Green500 List ranks the world's 500 most powerful super computers by their energy efficiency. It is an important riposte to an IT industry which has so far put speed first