5 Tips for Green IT

Building and running a green IT shop isn't just good for the environment, it can also be good for a business' bottom line, since it can reduce hardware costs and reduce power and cooling expenses.

Here are five tips for making your IT department a little more green:

• Centralize: “Recognize the value of having as small a hardware footprint as possible in the field,” advises Bill Burke, CIO for WR Starkey Mortgage.
• Virtualize: “VMware is easy, beautiful and rock-solid,” says Brian Klesc, Starkey’s network engineer.
• Optimize: For distant locations, go beyond prioritizing WAN traffic, emphasizes Justin Thomas, systems administrator at Starkey. “Allocate specific amounts of bandwidth to specific computing applications.”
• Rationalize: Understanding every device’s impact will help you prioritize equipment refreshes. “Calculate IT impacts on energy costs, whether you’re charged for power or not,” says Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.
• Standardize: Uniformity assists with effectively automating processes, which, in turn, significantly reduces various types of IT overhead, Burke says.