GREEN NETWORKING
How and why you should ‘green’ your network Green With Envy
Getting to grips with green networking is not only ethically desirable; it makes really good business sense. We spoke to a selection of experts about the move towards greener networks.
Green business isn’t just about good publicity and taking responsibility for the environment; it presents an opportunity to cut significant energy costs at a time of rising prices. Here we have gathered advice and opinions on the advantages of ‘greening’ your network. “The subject is one that many companies have ignored,” explained Ian Wilkie, Supply Chain Director at Brand-Rex. “Others have just tried to use ‘publicity’ to appear green. These companies are totally missing the point.” Wilkie went on to explain that, in fact, there are massive cost savings for every business to make simply from analysing where in its operations energy and ‘carbon’ are utilised and emitted; and then to start by tackling the main culprits. “Our experience over the last
ten years in ‘greening’ Brand-Rex operations has led to us becoming the lean, fit organisation that we now are. And this is turn has enabled us able to grow significantly whilst
most other datacoms infrastructure manufacturers have been shrinking.” Andy Lowe of Carbon Clear, one
of the world’s leading providers of carbon advisory services and carbon offsets, agrees. “Now that IT has become the ‘life-blood’ of so many companies and public services, its contribution to energy consumption and ‘carbon footprint’ is increasingly significant. Data centres are massive culprits here and IT professionals are starting to think seriously about energy reduction, but these things take time.”
Getting started is the most important thing according to Lowe. “No-one is expecting every company to be perfectly carbon neutral next week! But if every company makes a few relatively easy adjustments – globally this adds up to a massive impact.”
Camco is a market leading advisor
on energy and emission reduction. “There is an old adage: If you don’t measure it, you can’t tell if you’ve improved it!” commented
Consultant, Andrew Prosser. “But many companies aren’t yet
able to measure their energy usage accurately. Once they put in place simple measuring processes then the most amazing things come to light.”
Network Level What does this mean for IT and network managers in their daily jobs? Andy Lowe of Carbon Clear
explained: “It’s about efficiencies and cost reduction really. At the data centre level there are massive cost savings to be made by stopping things from using energy when they don’t need to.” According to Kennedy Miller, Senior
Development Engineer at Brand-Rex, “In data centres, the tendency has been to deploy ‘server-per-application’, but in reality this leads to a lot of servers drawing power 24/7 but not doing much for most of the time, putting them at their lowest energy efficiency.” Miller continued to explain that
techniques like server virtualisation are beginning to enable data centre operators to reduce the total number
Off-site pre-terminations are made in static-free conditions Green networking makes seriously good business sense. 32 NETCOMMS europe Volume II Issue 3 2012
www.netcommseurope.com
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