Greening Your IT

Computer networks and the Internet have freed businesses of all sizes from many of the visible costs associated with intra-office communication. Gone are the days of fax machines and couriers. Today, a user at his desk can instantly send a 300 page report to his colleagues on the other side of the planet for next to nothing. Almost nothing, though, isn’t the same as free. There are real costs associated with transmitting emails, both in dollars and cents and in greenhouse gases.

McAfee, Inc. and the climate-change researchers from ICF International have calculated the amount of energy required to transmit, process, and filter all of the spam email sent worldwide for an entire year. Their results are astounding:

[the annual energy] totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same green house gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

Each spam message is responsible for, on average, 0.3 grams of CO2. That is the equivalent of driving your car three feet! Multiply that by the 358 spams I received yesterday and you’ll see the enormity of the situation. Non-spam email doesn’t have quite the same costs associated with it, because much of spam’s energy consumption comes from users deleting it and trying to find the legitimate email mixed amongst it. But, it does cost something.

Green computing is an effort to make networks and computers more energy efficient. Because corporate computer systems rely on wide variety of computers, networking equipment and employees, there are many techniques available to green up your IT infrastructure. One of the best options for greening your computer systems is to take advantage of virtualization technologies. Virtualization is the process by which software running on a computer is separated from the computer itself.

Marshall asks

What are few practical first steps I can take to use business intelligence tools to improve customer experience?