Band of Brothers

The action that IT companies typically initiate when widely criticized about their corporate behaviour is to band together to form an open consortium. They create mission statements and specifications, sponsor public forums and hold conferences. Occasionally, a year or three later, a beneficial product or action results. Coincidentally, an organization called Green Grid has been established, with 11 founding companies including Sun, AMD, Dell, HP, Microsoft, VMWare and Intel.

Green Grid's mission is to promote the development of energy efficient processors, servers and networks and to promote best practices in data centre operation. They don't expect to be able to reduce energy use, but to use power more efficiently as computer processing demand inevitably grows. In other words, fix nothing now but hopefully fix things in the future. One of the Green Grid's four working groups, Data Centre Operations, will be busy establishing measurements and metrics for energy efficiency. They fit neatly into the Do as I Say camp.

Not that I also fall into that camp, but here are some actions you should immediately instigate to green your IT operations:

• Move all printers two floors away from the users. After a couple of weeks, when the printouts pile up as people can't be bothered walking up stairs to retrieve their documents, replace the printers with a virtual printer.

• Plant trees around the office — inside not outside. Dump a load of dirt on the carpet near your desk and plant a seedling. False flooring in data centres also provides an ideal garden bed. Perhaps add some flowers because they look pretty. Tell any enquiring managers that this is part of the company's carbon neutral policy.

• Use lower powered CPUs and drop LAN card connection speeds to 10Mbps to dramatically lower device power consumption. You'll need to concurrently develop a plan to deal with your user revolt when you tell them you're downgrading their computers (even though they've never gone above 8 percent utilization).

• If your administrators don Arctic-rated jackets and gloves when entering the data centre, it may be over-chilled. Reduce the air conditioning, or better still turn it off. Recent research from Google engineers suggests temperatures exceeding 37ºC may not be damaging to disk drives, so it should be OK to make your computer room the hotspot of the company that you've always wanted it to be.

• Extend the company's recycling program beyond the current one where employees take unused (or sometimes actively used) equipment from the office so it can remain unused at home. Giving old computers to schools is a fine idea as long as you're willing to provide 24-hour help desk for the next six years, or ready to take the computers back in a month when the students complain the PCs are too slow. (It's the same complaint you heard from your users, but primary school students are tougher to ignore.