Green IT is an all-too-common catchphrase. But amid all the talk, what does green IT actually mean and what does your company need to do to get involved?

Green IT constitutes the activities that contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gases and a company’s overall carbon footprint.

Is it good to be green? Well, yes ­ – to the extent that being green results in operational cost saving and leads to process efficiency.

The various steps needed to reduce greenhouse gases are now widely promoted through legislative, media and industry channels.

At government level, there is a growing list of international and EU-wide mandates.

Each regulation has a different point of focus and can be adopted separately or as a total package.

The IT industry itself has taken the initiative to improve its green credentials through a series of self-imposed programmes.

One such project is the Green Grid, a set of standards devised by a consortium of manufacturers including AMD, IBM, HP, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

The Green Grid aims to increase hardware efficiency and reduce energy consumption. And the availability of a standards-based check list makes it easier for IT leaders to not only measure the efficiency of the IT environment, but also to determine the green credentials of their proposed upgrades and replacements.

Datacentres have long been known as major power guzzlers ­ – in the sense of the resource-hungry machines and because of the associated air-conditioning requirements.

Such problems are getting worse. While a company’s power consumption bill for IT in the past might have contributed up to 10 per cent of overall operational costs, datacentre resource requirements can reach up to 30 per cent of costs given the rising price of energy.

Costs alone make initiatives such as the Green Grid an imperative. Now other developments are also having a major impact.

New blade technology allows servers to run cooler, leading to reduced air-conditioning requirements, helping to save energy and enhance the office environment for users.

Another of the most significant IT developments of recent times is virtualisation, which aims to provide similar capacity and capabilities to the traditional datacentre ­ – but with a fraction of normal power consumption.

At desktop level, meanwhile, the drive for operational efficiency has simultaneously led to better power management and an average of 10 to 20 per cent overall energy savings.

The savings are being achieved through innovations such as the installation of software that automatically closes down unattended PCs. The cost of a PC left running overnight can be as much as £75.

Other applications are timed to boot up PCs at night to run routine tasks, including software upgrades, and to take advantage of off-peak electricity rates, powering down when tasks are complete.

Such developments help to prove that rather than just being a marketing bandwagon, IT leaders can use green policies to help cut emissions.

Robert Saxby is senior consultant at benchmarking specialist Metri Measurement Consulting