Crucial considerations for green compliance

Johannesburg, 13 Aug 2009

Organisations should always look at architecture, design, deployment, operations and the disposal of solutions when they want to test their IT solutions for green compliance, says Paul Wandrag, senior strategy advisory consultant at Microsoft SA.

Wandrag will speak at the ITWeb Green Summit on 18 August, at The Forum in Bryanston. His presentation will focus on architecting greener solutions.

He advises organisations to always re-evaluate what service level agreement its internal customers really need. This is because any business can claim their solution is most important and requires 24/7 availability. “This usually results in large amounts of energy consumption,” he says.

A crucial question that should be considered, according to Wandrag, is whether organisations can measure energy consumption in relation to productivity. He says he has seen interesting reports on “which line of business system uses the most energy, versus which line of business system is most important to revenue”.

Organisations should also look at how well the solution “goes to sleep at night”, he says. “There are many server management solutions out there that allow servers to be put to sleep at night.” Organisations should switch off their hardware at the end of the day as this will save energy, he advises.

When it comes to operations, Wandrag says capacity planning is often a neglected practice in many IT departments and that organisations should question how the proposed capacity has been determined.

Most important, according to Wandrag, is for an organisation to know when a solution has reached its “end-of-life” and how to dispose of its waste responsibly. “A common server growth factor is not so much the amount of new infrastructure being deployed, but the rate at which the old infrastructure is not taken out, and still left running,” he says.

This year the Green IT Summit is targeted at senior IT, technology, procurement and strategic planning executives tasked with managing the energy consumption and cost implications of IT within their organisations. It will focus on the practical benefits of implementing green technologies, and the implications for business processes.