Excessive power consumption uses a vast amount of electricity that must be generated through
hydroelectric plants or coal-fired power plants. While hydroelectric generation plants are less
stressful on the environment than coal-fired, nevertheless, they do pull resources from more useful
purposes. Coal-fired power plants generate huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
which some scientists and politicians claim is a major cause of global warming. Social implications of increased power consumption point to global warming.
Businesses must pay to power their servers and then pay again to keep them cool and operational.
Cooling a server requires roughly the same number of kilowatts of energy as running one.
2. What solutions are available for these problems? Are they people, organizational, or technology solutions? Explain your answer.
Some of the solutions to cut power consumption discussed in the case study are a good beginning.
People: employee telecommuting; users understanding and abiding by policies in which they turn
PCs off when not in use.
Organizational: building data centers that take advantage of hydroelectric power generation rather
than coal-fired power plants; renewable energy projects; alternative energy; better management of
computing resources.
Technology: thin client computers, software that automatically turns computers off; more efficient
chips. Perhaps the most environment-friendly solutions are those that control the hardware and
software, thereby controlling the problem at its source. Virtualization holds great promise as a way
to reduce power requirements by reducing the number of servers required to run applications.
3. What are the business benefits and costs of these solutions?
Even though it may cost a business up-front money to install hardware and software that reduces
power requirements, it will save a business a lot of money in the long run by reducing the amount it
pays for electricity to run the equipment and cool it at the same time. Businesses that reduce their
power needs help the environment and can promote themselves as environment-friendly.
4. Should all firms move toward green computing? Why or why not?
All firms should make some effort to reduce their power requirements and promote green
computing. From a business standpoint it makes sense to reduce costs, both short term and long
term.
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