Conference: Green IT Track

Leading organizations are reevaluating their value chain through a green lens to mitigate risk, reduce costs and increase revenues to ultimately deliver shareholder value. To determine IT's role in the "Green Enterprise," IT leadership needs to get up to speed on what the Green Enterprise is and its motivations. This session will introduce the "Green Enterprise" concept, discuss the heightened expectations of IT and offer practical steps for IT leadership to enable more green business behaviors; not just greener IT.

While the data center often receives much of the Green IT spotlight, tremendous value is being left on the table by overlooking PCs and office peripherals. In fact, The Climate Group estimates that PCs and related peripherals consume close to three times the amount of energy and related CO2 emissions as the data center. This does include the green value from collaboration tools such as video conferencing, virtual meeting and work-from-home technologies. To help IT professionals expand their scope of Green IT, this session will introduce greening strategies beyond the data center.

The next few years will bring widespread awareness of the environment's impact—especially energy costs—associated with data storage. Already several regulations and initiatives—for example, restriction of hazardous substances (ROHS), waste from electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and Energy Star—affect manufacturers of storage components or computers. There are also some innovative storage technologies especially targeted towards energy conservation including a massive array of idle disks (MAID), along with the well-known alternatives of removable storage like tape and optical. Several vendors have also begun to offer data on power use, energy consumption and cooling loads in response to competitive pressures from other vendors and customers. Some vendors and consultants are offering energy modeling as part of their total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis, either for competitive reasons or as part of their professional services portfolio. This presentation will quickly review basic engineering topics relevant to understanding "Green," including stuff you may have successfully avoided, such as environmental chemistry; thermodynamics; energy vs. power; and computational and storage density, as well as the resulting energy and cooling issues. Conceptual models sufficient to understand or even develop energy budgets will be taught. All of this will converge on a basic model for TCO that includes energy modeling. This session has been brought to you by the SNIA Green Storage Initiative.