This edition’s ‘Hot Topic’ from the business world is Green Computing. As pressure mounts for business owners and IT managers to reduce power bills and CO2 emissions, Star Flyer asks Mike Bain, Director of Escape, a leading Aberdeen IT firm, to explain the role virtualization plays in businesses ‘going green’.

For those of you who have watched Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (a documentary about the global climate change crisis), the first thing you probably thought is that you need to be more environmentally friendly.  For business owners and those who work in IT, it runs deeper into our working lives - IT is central to the energy ‘crisis’ and because of this, more organisations and their IT departments are ‘going green’. 

Globally, reducing electricity is a big focus – computer servers now use more electricity than a standard colour TV and many firms are trying hard to reduce their Carbon Footprint.   The source of electricity is the problem – in the US in 2005, 49.5% of electricity generated was from coal; coal emits nearly 2 times as much carbon as Natural Gas and 125% more than oil.  Therefore, the power that US companies use to run computers is coming from the worst possible source – coal.  Coupled with the fact that 93% of Carbon Dioxide emissions derive from electrical generation, it is essential we reduce the amount of electricity used to power our server rooms and in essence, our computers.

In the UK, to combat this problem, many firms are embracing Virtualization - allowing multiple virtual machines to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine.   Virtualization has been around for many years but never fully utilized – however, with the realization that technology such as VMware could make a big difference to productivity and the environment, it has grown in demand.  So much so, VMWare is classed as one of the fastest-growing businesses in the history of the software industry.  Virtualisation is easy, especially with the converting/virtualization tools that VMWare offers – in fact, nearly 9 out of every 10 companies will have implemented virtualization in their IT infrastructure by the end of 2007.  The technology allows you to run your applications on fewer physical servers, which in turn reduces power and cooling requirements. 

By embracing virtulisation technology, it is providing the perfect opportunity for organisations to reduce carbon emissions, yet still maintain the power and force of their IT infrastructures.  Business owners should be pushing to become ‘carbon neutral’ and given that it’s IT that’s driving 60 percent or more of a company’s power utilisation, virtulisation should be the first step towards this. 

Not only does reducing the size of your server estate using VMWare or the other virutalization platforms save you money through direct energy costs, you can also use it as a vehicle to reduce your annual hardware support costs.   Becoming virtual is not only technically and financially smart, but environmental too.