An Introduction to Green IT
When you start considering the best ways to save energy, IT systems architecture isn’t likely something that you’d immediately consider: all this talk of distant servers and ‘the cloud’ suggests something ethereal and abstract, rather than something physical with a carbon footprint. However, given the ICT sector is responsible for 1.8-3.9% of global greenhouse emissions, this obviously isn’t the case. Given this, we thought we’d explain the concept of ‘green IT’ (otherwise known as green ICT or green computing) and look at some ways that you can make your systems more efficient.
What is Green IT?
Sleep mode is a ubiquitous part of using a piece of hardware. Whether it’s someone going off to make a cup of tea and finding their laptop locked when they return (me today), a person’s screen going blank when they didn’t interact with a Zoom call for a few minutes (me last week), or a child crying when their computer unexpectedly ‘died’ (me aged five), a device going into a low power mode after being left for a period of time is something that we now all expect. However, what many people don’t realise is that this is an early example of green IT, or the attempt to reduce harmful environmental impacts of hardware and software through reducing energy use, increasing efficiency, reducing waste etc. This can be done through making alterations to software as well as hardware, as different pieces of software require different amounts of energy to run (for example, a more efficient piece of software would require less energy to run than its less efficient counterpart).
Apart from the obvious environmental benefits (which are becoming all-the-more important given both a looming climate crisis and a growing public expectation that organisations are trying to reduce their emissions), implementing green IT can increase efficiency and reduce costs, with this having a larger impact the more extensive your IT systems are. Therefore, green IT is something that many companies should consider implementing.
Examples of Green IT
Beyond more standard sustainability practices, such as turning devices off rather than leaving them on standby mode and ensuring that they are only turned on when in use, there are two key ways that IT can be made more eco-friendly: hardware manufacture and software configuration.Green hardware manufacture consists in reducing the number of resources consumed by hardware manufacture through creating objects which last for longer and making these out of renewable or responsibly sourced components. This reduces the impact of the hardware itself. Software configuration consists mainly in moving away from individual servers towards cloud computing and server virtualisation. Cloud computing is when documents and apps are stored and run by remote servers and accessed via the internet (think about how you stream content on Netflix - rather than having the movies downloaded onto your device, they are streamed from the internet, often via a webpage). Server virtualisation is similar in that, rather than a computer having an individual server (or bit that does the actual computing), it connects to a shared server via an internal network. The environmental benefits of these are less obvious than with hardware manufacture but become clear when you think about economies of scale. As with the cloud and virtualisation computing resources are shared, less energy is consumed, reducing the carbon footprint of the computing. As well as this, when accessing a document via the cloud rather than downloading a copy, energy is saved as duplicates (and the energy required to save them) aren’t needed. Through configuring your software in this way (as well as ensuring that it is as efficient as possible), you can save energy, reducing costs and helping the environment.
