Putting green in the bank
Green IT has been brushed off as just another fad, but for many industry players it has generated strong revenue streams and is now considered part and parcel of good practice. TREVOR CLARKE reports.
Green IT has been brushed off as just another fad, but for many industry players it has generated strong revenue streams and is now considered part and parcel of good practice. TREVOR CLARKE reports.
Australian IT services providers have escaped entanglement in the US financial meltdown and report business conditions are remaining steady.
And the solid-state drives (SSDs) go marching in. Since their arrival on the IT landscape, SSDs have quietly maintained camp on the outskirts of the blossoming notebook market, constrained by poor economies of scale and performance. But now, as prices start to fall, memory capacity increases and users realise the technical advantages, SSDs are primed for battle – but not necessarily with traditional mechanical hard drives.
Lights, cameras… action? Not just yet. While the stage has been set, and the IT crowd hushed in anticipation of the virtual desktop play, corporations haven’t rushed to adopt the much-hyped sibling of industry darling, server virtualisation.
Clearly the health industry is a big focus for Microsoft, why has this come about?
IBRS advisor, Dr Kevin McIsaac, claims channel partners helping clients refurbish a city datacentre should be posing some searching questions before any work is undertaken.
If you are still a little sceptical on the green IT push, consider this: In Australia during the 2008/09 financial year, servers will use 2.61 billion kilowatt hours of power, the cost will be $256 million and that will result in 2.6 billion kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions.
For a lot of older city datacentres the juices just aren’t flowing any more. In fact, getting more power has become a chronic pain point that is affecting performance.
IT industry associations have warmly applauded a proposal to change an Australian research and development tax concession into a more simplified credit to boost local innovation.
With many city-based datacentres struggling to keep up with contemporary IT demands, decision makers are left with the choice of moving on to a newer facility or refurbishing their existing one. But while newly built datacentres can have the latest and greatest energy efficient technologies and environmentally-friendly designs, not everyone is willing or able to migrate to them. For those who do elect to continue with their existing facility the cold, hard truth is that they must refurbish or renovate to keep up with increasing IT demands and financial – and environmental – pressures. ARN spoke with several industry leaders to identify areas the channel could help clients refurbish and renergise the datacentre.
Australian IT leaders have called for the establishment of an industry-wide green IT code of conduct or accreditation program.
Flippantly equating a mobile phone to one of the holiest of holy figures in religious history is ballsy – even Judas would have thought twice. All the same, it’s a pretty good reflection of the revolutionary impact the iPhone 3G – coined the ‘Jesus Phone’ by many in the blogsphere – has had on the collective consumer conscious.
Adelaide-based IT support and consulting company, Calvert Technologies, has appointed Puneet Awasthi as a technical engineer as part of plans to expand the company.
Virtualisation management vendor, PlateSpin, has tweaked its channel program in an effort to boost channel business globally.
Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are like your health insurance policy – you pay for one and forget about it until something drastic happens and you need a bit of support. Unlike most other areas of IT, which transform and advance at F1-speed while generating plenty of hype, UPS are slow moving beasts that rarely light up a conversation.