Green IT Boosts Energy Saving and Emission Reduction

In 2009, research institutes of various countries foresaid that under the current economic circumstances, corporate IT applications will focus on cost reduction, application integration and energy conservation & emission reduction this year. As the world's largest IT product manufacturing country, China will regard "green IT" as its new bright point in terms of energy conservation and emission reduction and economic growth method transformation.

The "green IT" means that firstly, the IT products should be energy conservative and environment friendly; secondly, IT helps other industries realize energy conservation and emission reduction.

According to statistics of the market research institute CCW RESEARCH, presently 86 percent of domestic companies have heard of the concept of green IT, but only 6 percent of them have an in-depth knowledge of green IT. So what on earth the "green IT" refers to?

The green IT not only means a smaller figure on the electricity meter. "Firstly, it means that the manufacture, packaging, transportation, usage, disuse, and recycling of IT products should meet the demands of energy conservation and environmental protection; secondly, as a tool of corporate operation and management, IT helps a lot in terms of the energy conservation and emission reduction of the businesses and the society", said Cao Kaibin, Deputy General Manager of CCW RESEARCH.

As China's central government attach more and more importance to energy conservation and emission reduction and people's environmental protection consciousness increases day by day, more and more businesses, institutions and organizations tend to choose green productions in IT product purchase. In October 2008, China's third batch of "Government Acquisition List of Products with Environment Mark" was officially publicized, and micro computer and monitor were on the list for the first time, which highlighted that China's central government is attaching greater importance to the energy conservation and emission reduction of IT products, and provided green IT products of IT businesses with more advantageous surviving and developing space.

In terms of IT products' energy conservation, data center, the "big energy consumers", is paid most attention, of which the energy consumption takes up about 40 percent of the total IT energy consumption.

With the enhancing corporate informatization level in China, data center, which is called the "nerve center" of corporate informatization, has become a "big energy consumer" in IT field. Statistics shows that in China, data centers consume more than 40 percent of energy in the total IT energy consumption, and the large corporate data centers consume the same electricity as the total electricity volume of thousands of households.

To put it simple, data center is the center realizing the data sharing and utilization. It integrates components of various suppliers and products including connecting devices, servers, storage devices etc. Data centers are indispensable for government departments and businesses to realize data sharing. Therefore, most of the current green IT programs tend to start up from data centers, where the energy efficiency can be enhanced by a largest margin.

How should a green data center be built up? The secret lies in the technological improvement of hardware and software. Surveys show that users increased in accepting the form that green IT product are provided through hardware, for example, the blade servers. In the construction of green data center, hardware develops quicker due to its remarkable energy conservation effect. However, the data center is a complicated ecosystem. Besides hardware, software is also a key tache, which helps realize the greening of data center through enhancing the operation efficiency of data center.

As to the tendency of technological improvement, the cost reduction and environmental protection are two major directions. Recently, IBM announced that its "Project Big Green" had entered phase two, and launched the modularized and highly energy-efficient data center design globally, which can reduce as much as 50 percent energy consumption. Not satisfied with its blade server system of condensed data center, HP developed energy conservation technologies at various levels like dynamic intelligence heat ventilation technology. Intel actively streamlined its 116 data centers all over the world, and its ultimate goal is till 2014, there are only 20 large data centers in the world. From 2007 to 2014, Intel is hopeful to save US$225 million.

In terms of IT energy conservation, the industrial informatization solutions improve the operating efficiency of various departments of national economy and help energy conservation and emission reduction.

In fact, besides hardware products like data center, server, PC, and printer, the software and industry solution are also concerned with green IT. Except paying attention to the energy conservation and environmental protection factors of IT products in design, manufacture, usage, and recycling, that reforming the business flow of traditional industries with IT technologies and realizing business innovation, so as to help traditional enterprises realize energy conservation and emission reduction is also important applications of green IT.

For instance, improving the computer application technologies can enhance the industrial structure and product quality of traditional enterprises to achieve the goal of energy conservation and consumption reduction. By making full use of information technologies, for instance, the energy conservation of numerical control machine, industrial engine, and industrial automation equipment, the energy utility of industrial equipments can be enhanced. Enhancing the energy utility in cargo shipping and storage courses through information technology can help logistics industry realize energy conservation and emission reduction. Data show that till 2020, as much as 1.52 billion tons of carbon emission can be reduced through intelligent logistics, and the value of saved energy will reach up to US$440 billion.

In the architecture industry, if we improve architectural design, building and management by the aid of information technology, the carbon emission of architectures can be reduced by 15 percent of. A report of "Global e-Sustainability Initiative" believes that if information technology is fully applied to energy conservation and emission reduction, the global greenhouse gases emission will be reduced by 15 percent than not at all in 2020.