Go Green, Young Man

Here's a guy who gets it, Craig Larsheid of the USPS. He's a guy that runs thousands of UNIX servers to handle mission critical applications. And he thinks about the environment every step of the way. Is he a treehugger?

He may be, he may be. But he also realizes it's the best way to do his job, particularly when other 'conventional' options are running out. Real estate, for example. As indicated in the post:

“We have finite real estate [to house servers] and a finite amount of cooling we can use,” Larscheid said. “So environmentally conscious [methods have] to be the way to go.”

Obviously this says it all, Craig doesn't feel too comfortable asking corporate to build another air conditioned building to house his servers. I wonder how many other IT managers are in the same boat? (hint: more and more.)

Good thing Craig isn't alone. Gartner has projected that up to 50 percent of the IT budget will be for electricity in the future, way up from the 10 percent it is right now (20 percent if you count the cooling). The result will be that the Age of Innocence enjoyed by IT from the mid-1990's onwards will vanish, and finally we will have some cost accounting for IT projects. The first step? Make your IT department responsible for their energy use.