Environmental impact: IT sees the light on green computing

When Enterprise Rent-A-Car Co. completes a move from PCs to thin clients this summer, as part of the rollout of a new rental transaction system, it expects to cut internal energy consumption by 5 million kilowatt-hours.

That will save about $500,000 annually while reducing the company's carbon dioxide emissions by 6.5 million pounds each year, according to Enterprise officials. Energy costs and consumption were considerations when planning for the new system began earlier in the decade. But they have grown in importance for Enterprise -- so much so that the company issued a press release in April to let the public know how its shift to thin clients would help the environment.

That Enterprise would trumpet the environmental benefits of an IT upgrade says something about how going green is now viewed as a potential competitive advantage for companies. And the increasing focus on green computing as a marketing tool is giving new muscle to IT managers looking to make the case for steps such as upgrading to more efficient technologies, virtualizing servers and consolidating systems.

For instance, environmental concerns are reshaping Enterprise's approach to IT well beyond its installation of Hewlett-Packard thin clients. Six months ago, the St. Louis-based company set up a committee specifically to evaluate the environmental and energy-usage ramifications of IT purchases.

It also has measured the amount of power consumed by the servers, networking devices and other IT equipment in its main data center. Using a metric developed by The Green Grid, a vendor consortium that focuses on IT energy efficiency, Enterprise found that only 40% of the energy consumed within the data center was being used by IT equipment, as opposed to air handlers, cooling systems and uninterruptible power supplies.

By turning off unused equipment and better managing its cooling processes, the company increased that percentage to 44%. "Just by doing a few small things, we were able to move our energy efficiency up significantly," said Jim Miller, assistant vice president of IT. Now Enterprise is evaluating more extensive, and more expensive, efforts to improve the cooling systems in the data center, he added.