10 tips to green IT: energy efficiency offers significant business and environmental benefits.

Despite the slowing economy, twice as many companies are accelerating their green IT initiatives compared to firms that are scaling back green projects, according to a recent survey by Forrester Research. Of the 1,022 companies surveyed, nearly half say they will accelerate or maintain their green IT projects. The main reason: to save money. Some 67 percent of companies say the driving force behind their green agenda is to reduce energy bills, while 33 percent say reducing the environmental impact of IT is the goal.

Here are 10 tips to help move toward a financially and environmentally greener IT.

1. Replace old hardware. Incorporate energy-efficient technologies into every IT refresh. EPEAT- and ENERGY STAR-certified systems deliver energy efficiency as well as higher performance to save energy costs, and can often reduce the amount of equipment needed. Replace cathode ray tube monitors with more-efficient light-emitting diode monitors. Consider thin clients and solid-state drives, which have lower power requirements. Today's market offers a wide variety of products that are considerably more energy efficient than old equipment.

2. Cut the clutter. Replace older, energy-inefficient devices that serve only one function with multifunction devices. Converge multiple networks into a single infrastructure to reduce the number of devices needed.

3. Virtualize. Virtualization increases server utilization, which means running fewer servers, consuming less power and requiring less cooling. Virtualizing servers can prevent the need to build a new data center. "The greenest data center you can have is the one you don't build," says Albert Esser, vice president of data center infrastructure at Dell.

4. Power management. Set power settings to activate the hibernate/sleep/shutdown settings on idle systems. Turn off equipment that is not in use. Activate the power-management features on servers to automatically reduce power use during periods of reduced demand for processor resources and increase automatically during periods of higher demand.

5. Decommission unused equipment. Unplug equipment that is no longer in use. Recover some asset value if possible. Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment at end of life.

6. Intelligent cooling. IT managers can pinpoint hotspots and areas of energy inefficiency by looking at every rack, rather than at data centers or server rooms as a whole. Airflow problems can be addressed in the areas where they occur, rather than blanketing the entire data center with additional cooling.

7. Enable remote workers. Teleworking offers energy savings to the enterprise. As more people work from home, the company can consolidate office space, leading to fewer buildings to power, heat and cool. An added benefit is that fewer people commuting to work prevents billions of pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the environment.

8. Use video. Interactive video collaboration between employees, customers, suppliers and partners, as well as on-demand content distribution and on-the-job training, allows companies to trim their travel budgets while retaining "face-to-face" contact.

9. Consider managed services. Buying computing resources a la carte can help enterprises control costs, while attaining the performance and reliability required. Consuming IT resources (e.g., communications, server and storage) on an as-needed basis can help control costs and eliminate the need to equip, maintain, operate and staff every IT project.

10. Measure energy use. By exposing the energy hogs, administrators can determine which green projects will offer the biggest payoff.

While true green IT extends beyond energy efficiency, reducing IT's energy consumption offers immediate, tangible economic benefits. "In the current economic environment," Esser says, "you can't afford not to be green."

Communications News' GreenTech column focuses on a variety of issues concerning the green IT movement. You can contact Associate Editor Denise DiRamio at [e-mail].