It's Not Easy Being Green....

"Its not easy being green.  Spending each day the color of the leaves"  - Kermit the Frog

I am sure that the economy has stalled Green IT efforts in most organizations as is the case with us.  Historically, in lean times such as these, our budget situation will not improve for anywhere from 12-24 months after the economy starts to recover.  For us this means that our major Green efforts will not begin again any time in the forseeable future. By major I am refering to those projects that require a capital investment such as new equipment purchases for server consolodation, virtual desktops etc.  Our plan has changed to move forward with efforts that do not require a large upfront investment but that will still reduce our overall energy use and limit electronic waste in our landfills.

Some of the simple things or low hanging fruit we are picking are:

• maximizing our investments in server virtualization - we are looking to replace as many single servers as we can and move the applications and databases onto existing virtual environments thus eliminating racks of servers
  

• using existing desktop management tools to force logoff and powering down of desktop machines after business hours

• working with local non profits and K-12 to reuse desktops.  Linux runs well on older processors and the number of open source applications has increased tremendously in the last few years to make this a very viable combination for education and business

• looking for ways to increase telecommuting.  My city has had a policy in place for a number for years and we are starting to see more interest in telecommuting to save on office space use, etc.
  

• Replacing any CRT monitors with LCD displays

I know there are other things being done to continue to realize power savings etc. I am interested in hearing what others are doing during these challenging times to continue to move their Green efforts forward.