Green IT Book Podcast with Toby Velte
Green IT Book Podcast with Toby Velte
How does a guy with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience wind up doing green IT initiatives at Microsoft? He also has co-authored a guidebook called Green IT: Reduce Your show more...
How does a guy with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience wind up doing green IT initiatives at Microsoft and also co-writing a guidebook called Green IT: Reduce Your Information System's Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line and the upcoming? Dr. Toby J. Velte’s work in computational neuroscience focused on creating models that were very similar to the widespread enterprise networks found in most large companies and in government agencies. Contacts he made along the way helped him to secure a position at Microsoft helping large enterprise groups with their IT strategies, especially around green IT.
Velte’s green IT book provides a roadmap for how you can create a company-wide green IT program starting with your data centers, moving down to desktops, and empowering individual business units to develop their own IT strategies. He says that the number one problem companies have with moving forward with green IT isn’t the technology or having adequate funds. It’s the people situation.” He urges companies to get all of their stakeholders together to try to understand what the green initiatives are going to look like at the end of the day, and how do they plan to measure success. Next, companies need to measure everything starting with power consumption. “Most companies don’t have the metrics in place. People need to understand what they have and what they are consuming. “ Once companies know what outcomes they want to achieve, then it’s time to execute the green IT program as if it were another IT initiative.
In most companies, green IT begins in the data center. In fact, that’s where it began at Microsoft. When Microsoft built its new data center outside of Quincy, Washington, it supplemented reliance on the power grid by use of water power.
Meanwhile, virtualization and cloud computing can also cut down on a data center’s power consumption. He says, “By moving business process out to the cloud, you are really turning over the power consumption issue to the service provider. With virtualization, can you eliminate the servers with low utilization, say around 15 percent, by moving those applications to virtualized servers. You can achieve upwards of 80 percent utilization with fewer servers.”
In this podcast, Velte talks about some of the practical measurements you can take to make sure your desktops and data centers are green, the ways you can translate those metrics into meaningful results, the steps you can take to reduce your reliance on the power grid, and a plan companies can follow to stay green.
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