Obviously your company has at least a single desktop/laptop. If your a bigger company then you may have one or more servers. Many companies are trying to be “greener” or more environmentally friendly.
There are a number of ways though that you can counter-act this increase in power usage. Some are very simple physical changes that you can do to decrease power consumption when the computer is idle.
For example, use a surge protector to run all of your equipment through; which should already be the case to protect your equipment from power surges. When you go on your lunch break or leave for the day, hibernate or shut down your computer, and then turn off the surge strip, since even when your computer is “off” it still draws power. If you turn everything off, you will be amazed at how much money you can save. Other things that you can do is set your computer to put the monitor to sleep after five or ten minutes, again causing power to be conserved.
When it comes to your servers, there are also a variety of things that can be done such as setting up your server to be “headless” or in other words not have a monitor attached to it. If you need to manage your server on a regular basis you can set it up so that it can be remotely managed from another workstation or share monitors with another server if you have multiple.
You can also do things in the physical environment to promote natural cooling and airflow to a server room to help save on the cost of cooling a server room. Instead of constantly running the building air conditioner to cool the one room, while freezing out everyone just to get the server room cool, you may want to consider putting in a high efficiency air conditioner that controls the HVAC to that room only. By doing that you keep the building unit from constantly running just to keep one room cool, and the server room HVAC unit won’t have to run as often as well since it is a high efficiency unit dedicated to that room. You can also get the HVAC units so that they control the amount of humidity in the room, which is better for the servers anyway.
When it comes time to purchase new equipment, make sure that you are purchasing Energy Star certified equipment. Companies are also now coming out with “greener” servers and workstations that consume less power anyway, so you should try and watch for those and get them whenever you can.
Something that goes hand and hand with purchasing newer more efficient and “greener” equipment is what to do with the old equipment when you replace it. Don’t just chuck it in the trash, you can donate, sell, or recycle it. Some equipment such as CRT monitors have chemicals inside of them which can be very harmful the environment, people, and animals. Often times there are companies in your area that will help you recycle the old equipment properly instead of trashing it. A simple Google search will bring them up. An example of one in the Greenville, SC area where we are located is Ever-Green Recycling (http://www.ever-greenrecycling.com).
There are a number of other things that can be done, but this is hopefully just a simple overview that will give you some easy techniques that you can implement to help your company cut costs, and become more “green.”
