Techworld

BP, the Nectar loyalty card scheme and IT supplier Atos Origin on Monday launched a five-month personal carbon credit trading trial, intended to show that such a scheme could be set up inexpensively and using current technology.

Nexsan has taken its AutoMAID technology - which throttles back the power usage of hard drives that are not currently being accessed - and applied it to a SAS array, claiming to be the first supplier with an energy-efficient SAS storage system.

IBM has introduced a carbon-emissions modelling tool, aimed at helping businesses analyse the environmental impact of supply-chain decisions and to devise alternative business practices.

Why do so many people talk about carbon footprints, when what they mean is energy efficiency and power consumption?

Analyst report from In-Stat says LAN switches from 3Com are up to 60 percent more energy efficient than those from its competitors.

For every server virtualised, customers can save about 7,000 kilowatt hours, or four tons of CO2 emissions, every year, says company.

Green sells, whether the product in question is a hybrid car or a laptop computer. Tech firms know this, but they also face growing scepticism as a result of the the deluge of greenwash we are all being subjected to.

Only about 10 percent of PCs used by organisations have power management enabled, and as a result are wasting large amounts of electricity.

Nearly half of IT professionals admit that they had run out of space, power or cooling capacity at their datacentres, according to a recent survey of 150 IT professionals.

Its worth stating, again, what is really the blindingly obvious - thin-client work stations use one-twentieth of the power of a typical PC (10-20 watts versus 200-400 watts), require no maintenance or technical per-machine support and Open Source software is free of licence costs.

At IBM's SOA Impact 2008 show in Las Vegas, James Governor argues that if SOA is a means to better alignment between IT and the business, then we should also drive sustainability into the mix.

Heat from a datacentre built in a bunker is being collected and transferred to the nearby pool as part of an innovative energy efficiency project undertaken by GIB-Services, a Swiss IT co-location company.

Xerox has long been known for innovation and recently they released an online Flash-application-based Sustainability Calculator, which helps companies understand the savings they will achieve by reductions in the number of printers they have.

While it's true that many organisations are looking to reduce their carbon footprint, it's also the case that much of the green hype is unfounded. Besides, there's plenty of evidence that planting-a-tree missions are a misguided approach to reducing carbon emissions.

Now, why didn't we think of that? British software firm Access Accounting has incorporated a tool within its accounting package that will enable enterprises to assess the carbon footprint of individual users or departments within the company.