Sustainability is recognized as an important global issue to persist on this Earth and make a tomorrow for the next generation to come. Slowly, people are making it their duty to be environmentally responsible. True to form, “Going green,” has become a very popular slogan among individual consumers and businesses. Individuals, homeowners, and business owners are finding ways they can contribute to conserving energy by finding green solutions that work for them. In turn, providing those green solutions is equally appealing to technological companies.
As most companies know, sometimes getting an item to sell is more how it is marketed than what it actually has to offer to the consumer. Business professionals are using this growing trend to market their products as green. Thus, consumers are being duped into purchasing green products that are not offering much of a green solution at all. Or, perhaps the solution being offered is not very innovative, but just marketed well, and the consumer ends up purchasing an unoriginal solution for a higher price. Being a responsible consumer and researching these products is one solution. But, would it not be easier for someone else to weed out the good from the bad for you? Thus I propose, real, innovative green solutions offered by technology companies like GreenIT, VMware, Microsoft, and Electric Power Research Insitute (EPRI). Specifically, I will explain why GreenIT Roadmap, virtualization, cloud computing, Microsoft Hohm and efficient power supplies are the best green options.
So, you have decided you want to “Go green,” but how? Many business owners see the desire to go green, but do not know how to achieve their sustainability goals. Some are not even sure what their green objectives are at all. GreenIT Roadmap will help decide on the right ones for that company first and then build a program for your company to reach its green objectives. First, GreenIT Roadmap gets your organization’s Eco-profile, which is data concerning energy consumption, patterns of waste, and carbon dioxide emissions. Once, that data is collected, GreenIT analyzes the data and provides a summary of blueprints of usage and saving, the time it will take, the initial costs, and the difficulty in implementing these green solutions.
Another software solution is virtualization, which allows several virtual machines to be run on one physical machine that provides the applications for the multiple environments. Thus, the virtual machines can share the resources from the one physical machine, instead of having several physical machines that use only about five to ten percent of their servers. While more and more companies are beginning to offer virtualization solutions, VMware is recognized as the global leader of virtualization solution with all Fortune 100 companies using VMware and eighty-nine percent of all virtualized applications worldwide trust VMware. With the service virtualization provides, the ability to share resources and only use one server for several environments can minimize power consumed and carbon dioxide emissions. In total, “VMware has saved customers 39 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, more than enough power used annually to heat and cool the country of Denmark (VMware, 2008).” In addition to minimized power consumed, according to VMware, every year four tons of carbon dioxide emissions are conserved for every virtual environment created (2008). Virtualization is not only a green solution, but actually saves money for the consumer. Within one-year time, a consumer will see a full return on investment by saving money on hardware, energy costs, and space.
Another product offered by VMware, Inc. is vSphere, the first cloud operating system. A cloud operating system, “transform[s] IT infrastructures into a private cloud, a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds, delivering IT infrastructure as a service (VMware, 2009).” Thus, it allows data centers to be transformed into simplified environments for greater reliability. In turn, vSphere creates greater efficiency, saving energy though time. In addition, vSphere is starting the path by allowing next generation technologies to maximize energy consumption.
Power management is one of the key ways to reduce energy consumption. Educating your company or household on their workload and behavior and how to alter will make the most of their energy use. It is estimated that the average company leaves 2,500 computers left on overnight, which amounts to $375,000 in energy costs for the average company due to lack of power management (Wheeland, 2009). Some consumers are just not aware of the impact little things like turning off your computer when not in use will save money and energy. Thus, knowing your energy consumption can provide insight on ways to minimize your energy consumption to conserve this planet’s resources. Microsoft Hohm is a free program designed to track your energy consumption as an individual, homeowner, or business owner. The program gives users information on their energy consumption, compares it with others in the area, and provides solutions to reduce energy consumption and save money, as a result.
Last, inefficient power supplies is a large waste of our energy. According to a report by GreenComputing, eighty-five percent of large business employees see energy efficient power supplies as an important greening practice. Reducing the amount of energy loss is one way to reduce your carbon footprint and overall energy consumption. According to Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), there are six to ten billion power supplies globally, which lose some percentage of energy when converting high voltage alternating current from the outlet to low voltage direct current necessary for your electronic equipment. The best way to make sure you have the most energy efficient power supplies on the market is to make sure you do not go cheap and spend the money. Later, you will make the money back that you spent on the more expensive power supply over the cheap one. While currently there is not a 100% effective power supply on the market, EPRI is in the works. Currently, EPRI is working on projects that will manufacture energy efficient power supplies and put them on a global market.
In conclusion, being a responsible consumer is necessary in the green market to sort the real solutions from the fake. There are many technology companies that see the desire of consumers to “go green” and market their products accordingly, whether a real innovative solution or not. I have provided five innovative, green solutions for consumers including GreenIT Roadmap, VMware Virtualization, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Homh, and EPRI Project. So now that you have the information to get started, why waste anymore time? Start greening your company today.
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