These days it’s hard to move anywhere without being urged to make ‘green’ changes in our lifestyle. In reaction to these consumer trends, computer manufacturers worldwide have embarked to align business strategies with the broader issue of protecting the environment. The computers’ CO2 emissions have been estimated to be at two per cent of the world’s total, thus the entire community is waking up to the challenge of sustainable development.
At the manufacturing level, dominating firms such as HP especially are improving their processes, accounting for environmental impact, operational impact and end-of-life impact for their full range of products. They try to do this by minimising harm ‘before’ use by employing cleaner, leaner sourcing and manufacturing techniques, by designing products that consume less energy and materials ‘during’ use and helping with reuse and recycling ‘after’ use. This is why the new devices (especially based on Intel Atom Chipsets) are highly energy efficient and form factors across the board have been reduced greatly.
Corporations, too, are jumping on the bandwagon as being green serve the twin advantages of catering to consumer sentiments and increasing companies profitability as well. One way businesses are becoming greener, for instance, is via using ‘thin-clients’. This is a set up where you have a low-power device on your desktop instead of a PC Processor Box and all the work takes place at a central server or data centre.
This can take a lot of hassle out of desktop computing (and resulting maintenance, upkeep, etc.), increases security (since all updates are at the centre), is economical and requires minimal upgrades, since the average life span of such devises is around eight years.
Another area enterprises are addressing is their servers. It has been estimated that globally most servers never run beyond 30 per cent of their capacity, and though more powerful than desktop machines, their full potential has never been utilised. To address this challenge, virtualisation software has been introduced which allows centres to double the amount of work done by the same servers. This allows businesses to halve the total number of devices and decrease environmental impact as well.
Green IT is also taking place at home e.g. a standard PC can consume around 350 watts (that’s 1800 watts for six hours usage daily at a minimal Rs7.5 per KW). With rising education and electricity prices, consumers are now investing in products which use less power, give off less heat and are recyclable or made of renewable materials like bamboo.
These include new forms such as netbooks, ‘All-In-One-PCs’, Ultraportables and ECO PCs (less than 100 watts consumption).
There’s also a side benefit to this as unlike traditional devices, these products fit anywhere in the home.