It's been two years since Green IT concepts were launched at the world's largest IT exhibition: CeBIT in Hanover, Germany. Green IT is a combination of concepts that focus on saving the environment through innovations in information technology and maximizing the business/production process efficiency to conserve power and natural resources.

This remarkable idea can be implemented in our everyday life, especially in the business sector to push commerce. We look into Green IT concepts by introducing ways to reduce your business cost by analyzing 3 major resources that keep our daily IT system running.

HARDWARE including PC, server, peripheral and other network devices in your office has the highest potential to achieve a reduction of energy consumption. This means more saving on your electricity bill.

The quick and easy way to start with cutting power is to always turn off your PC and servers when not using them or at least put into to sleep mode. This applies not only to PC and servers, but also to UPS, printer and network devices. Some of these devices are equipped with a timer function that allows you to automatically turn on/off power at specific time.

Being aware of power consumption when you are buying new equipment is also important. Power consumption, especially with servers, varies, largely depending on the CPU clock, manufacturing process on CPU (depends on type of CPU), the Hard Disk's rotational speed, and type of HDD or Solid state drive. Purchasing a notebook computer rather than a PC is the energy-efficient choice. A Notebook's power consumption is usually 1/5 - 1/8 of a PC.

SOFTWARE can also contribute to Green IT by increasing your awareness in energy usage of IT assets in your office. Software that manages all your IT assets from one controller PC is good start in becoming aware of all your IT resources. Usually this automatically maps all your IT resources in the office and creates a list of equipment you have.

With a combination of IT resource management tools and a power consumption estimator, you are notified of your IT assets? usages against its capacities and approximate power consumption. This leads to the right judgment of new hardware purchase at the right time. For maximizing PC performance while lowering power usage, there is software to tweak your Operation System (OS).
A few adjustments can also be made from the energy saving and performance options in the control panel.

NETWORK is the easiest way to achieve Green IT. You should to change your network by adapting to a wireless network whenever it is possible. Recent wireless technology allows a throughput of up to 300MBits/Sec therefore, most files can be transferred to your destination device within a reasonable amount of time.

If you have a large network, possibly adapting higher bandwidth lines between networks such as ATM or fiber optic would save some cable resources and unnecessary network devices.

By adapting some Green IT concepts, you can spare your expense to push your core business while also contributing to society. You can indeed hit two birds with one stone.