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The Business Case and Methods for the Green Data Centre

"Green IT" is a hot topic at the moment. In the UK, data centres contribute nearly 2% of the country's CO2 emissions, a figure which is similar to that of the much-vilified airline sector. We recently broadcast a webinar on this subject which went very well - several people have said that it was our best webinar yet.

We were fortunate to have two excellent speakers. The first was Zahl Limbuwala of the BCS Specialist Group on Data Centres. This SG has developed an open source model for measuring server room efficiency, which will be published in January; Zahl presented the case for why energy efficiency is relevant and talked a little about this model.

The second speaker was Kate Craig-Wood, who runs a carbon-neutral hosting company. Kate gave a lot of low-level practical suggestions for improving the energy efficiency, which her company has used in their new data centre. There are obvious advantages in making such improvements, both economic and environmental.

The "Green IT" label covers many more issues, including the disposal of old equipment and power management within the office. Even when considering data centres, there are many avenues to approach, from building design, via power systems, to virtualisation software. We covered many of these topics.

The full title of the webinar was, "The Business Case and Methods for the Green Data Centre". You can see a Windows Media Player recording of the webinar here - just register and login to see it. A flash version will be provided in due course.

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