The most frequently heard phrase heard in the business environment today might be, "Do more with less." It refers to all aspects of the enterprise environment, from staffing to budgets to technology, which, of course are intimately connected to each other and to businesses' bottom lines.
One way for businesses - and IT departments, in particular - to achieve cost savings is through eco-sustainability projects, or looking to "Green IT" to help decrease their capital and operational expenses while increasing their communications capabilities. A second element of such programs is to reduce environmental and health impact of technology. What it amounts to is that "Green IT" is no longer an optional part of enterprise business plans, but a requisite part of developing a lean, agile, and sustainable operation.
As such, many businesses are looking for technology vendors whose solutions promote "greenness" while providing the IT capabilities businesses need to efficiently deliver products and services. This includes investing in products that are environmentally safe, energy efficient, have smaller physical footprints, and are easily recyclable.
Recent research suggests that more than half of enterprise decision makers consider eco-friendliness why choosing technology vendors, and a third already consider Green IT a crucial part of their selection process. Furthermore, four out of five executives say Green technology is becoming more important to their businesses.
The simple fact is that as more servers are deployed to handle more bandwidth intensive applications, and as enterprise networks become generally more complex, they generate an increased amount of heat. After all, each element in an IP infrastructure, from servers to phones, are drawing power and generating heat 24/7. This requires cooling systems to function 24/7 as well, and obviously, the more heat is dissipated from network hardware, the more cooling is required, and the more costly simply powering the network becomes.
There are several ways enterprises can reduce their overall heat dissipation, and of course, cooling and backup power requirements. After all, the lower the power requirements and heat dissipation, the lower the cooling and backup requirements become, reducing both energy and equipment expenses.
Certainly PoE is one way to reduce costs is to deploy PoE (Power over Ethernet) hardware where possible. Not only does this reduce the heat dissipated at the switch, it also reduces the main and backup power requirements to a minimal number of sources - the PoE switch(es).
Virtualization is another popular strategy for conserving energy while reducing CAPEX. Properly sized servers can run multiple operating systems and the applications they power, reducing physical footprint, power requirements, and heat (read: cost savings).
These and other means of creating a more energy efficient IT environment tie into a growing need among enterprises to become more dynamic, where the all business operations - hardware, software, people, processes - are all connected by a single converged architecture to drive efficiency and performance across the enterprise.
By deploying the latest Green strategies, including energy-efficient hardware, but also leveraging technology to hold virtual meetings and reduce paper documents - all of which also increase efficiency in a collaborative environment - the business world, and the telecom space, in particular, has the ability to promote eco-friendliness globally.
Alcatel-Lucent supports eco-sustainability initiatives through its wide range of environmentally friendly products and solutions, which are also designed to meet the growing needs to enterprises to provide faster, more reliable access to applications and services to its employees, whether in one physical location, at many sites, or in mobile environments.
To read more about eco-sustainability in the enterprise IT environment, read Alcatel-Lucent's white paper, Reducing Power Consumption: Improving the heat and power efficiency of switching and telephony equipment.
