Thinking Green

The best motivation you could ever say to push going green would be to highlight how much money a company could save. Xerox and Userful are on their way to helping other companies go green with their useful discoveries. Xerox created high yield paper that does not require as much pulp (therefore less trees) to manufacture. Userful's Discover Station pushes the idea of thin clients to another level, maximizing computer use to save on electricity.

Even simple changes in the way things are done could mean huge savings. UltraSpeed is claiming its setup can save 40% off their previous operating expenses, just from switching to DC power and using more power efficient chips on servers. Of course, they were also harping about a particular piece of technology they are implementing that can influence customers to go to them -- called 'Diskless' server implementation. It's similar to somewhat to the Diskless Node,(for servers and workstations) but uses instead a centralized NAS to serve up software to servers without disks. Pretty neat, huh? It's also more fault-tolerant, as NAS setups are more reliable owing to the fact that if one disk dies the backups are there to take over.

And in the bigger scheme of things, one can't help but wonder if IBM's promoting of it's System Z mainframes truly makes the case for going green. They say mainframes work more efficiently and require less space than the now more popular server setups. Question is if they are doing this to revive the market for mainframes. Upside is the System Z mainframes will run on Linux and are optimized for virtualization.

For all businesses concerned, going green should also mean making green. It's the win-win formula that has the potential to win over all of those suits who don't care about the environment.