If you are someone who is in charge of the hardware solutions that your company uses, you will find that it is quite important to consider what you need to do to make your office more green-friendly. There are a number of different ways that you can integrate environmentally appropriate solutions in your office, and some of them might be a great deal more hardware oriented than you might think. With the energy crisis coming to a head and more and more businesses seeing the result, you'll find that there is a great deal that you can do to reduce your energy output as well as your financial overhead. Take some time and really consider what your options are and what green solutions can do for you.

In the first place, you will find that unless you are taking some fairly rigorous measures, you are overspending on electricity. Your data centre is a place that is positively bleeding cash, often in the realm of thousands of '£s' every single month, and the sole culprit can be inefficient power equipment. When you are looking into making your data centres more efficient, you'll discover that you need to take a look at the uninterruptible power supplies that lead to your servers. These devices, also known as UPS, are designed in such a way as to keep the servers running and to guard against grid failure. They are vital, but there is a good chance they are operating less than 75% energy efficiency.

The result, when you are looking to make sure that your office is saving money and is acting in a more eco-friendly environment, is that you are going to need to think about what you can do to get your old UPS hardware replaced with smaller, modular units. This can reduce the cost of your energy bill by more than 20% every hour. This can make a huge difference in the amount of energy that is wasted and the amount of money that you save.

You should also think about what your options are going to be when you are thinking about cooling your equipment. Most organizations will merely have traditional floor-based cooling, which will be quite indiscriminate as to the amount of energy contained. When you are looking to eliminate this waste, switching to in-row chillers that focus their effect on very specific heat sources can be a key way to move forward with making your servers and your server room more green compliant. Other solutions do involve making the most out of your existing hardware through the use of server virtualization software.

Similarly, you will find that even the servers that you use themselves can be made more energy efficient. Large name companies like Dell are currently rolling out servers that are designed to be energy conservative. In Dell's case, their PowerEdge Energy Smart models tend to host a processor that draws on only 40 watts of power versus the more standard 65 or even 80, and more generally, there is a claimed 25% improvement.

Consider where the energy issues of today leave you and your company. Don't get left behind, check out the green servers that can do so much for you!