UK Government paints IT bright green

Aggressive plan for carbon neutrality by 2012

(photo courtesy The Guardian)

The UK government is going beyond talk to action on greening their technology.  Tom Watson, the UK Minister of Transformational Government, has written a policy paper with pragmatic steps UK IT will take (and IT shops everywhere are likely to emulate) to materially reduce carbon footprint.  From page 5:

• Extending the lifecycle of all ICT purchases to their natural demise either caused by failure, inability to support the business objectives of the organization, excessive maintenance costs or excessive carbon footprint and energy consumption, as opposed to frequent automatic refresh and replacement programs.
• Reducing the overall number of PCs and laptops used by an organization to reach as close to a 1:1 ratio
• Implementing a range of active device power management actions
• Reducing the overall number of printers used by organizations and replace with multi-function devices ( i.e., better document management)
• Increasing average server capacity utilization to achieve a minimum of 50% where possible (to comply with the forthcoming European Code of Conduct for the operations of data centers)

What does this mean for storage vendors and providers?

• Scalability and capacity become even more critical to extend storage system life
• Decoupling of personal content from PCs and laptops to expand multi-user system use
• Increased focus on idle power consumption and power-down modes
• Server virtualization, anyone?

Taking “green” down to real-world actions in this way will drive real change in system providers.  Hats off to Tom Watson and his hands-on approach.