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Think Again
IBM is encouraging customers and policymakers to think more carefully about the choices they make in such diverse areas as electricity generation and distribution and....shipping frozen chickens and fresh carrots?!?! Yes indeed....
Our planet faces serious challenges. Information technology — yes, including mainframes — must rise to solve increasingly complex optimization problems. Sure, it's marketing, but the message is both serious and exciting for IT people like me. IT itself, poorly optimized, can negatively impact the planet. Certainly this blog has raised the point repeatedly that mainframes help slash data center energy costs like nothing else, and (some) IT people need to get past their prejudices and start implementing more mainframes and fewer servers averaging 5% busy. (And application and information architects need to stop sitting on the sidelines and actively help optimize data centers by making energy-sensitive architectural decisions. Infrastructure does matter a lot and must not be an afterthought.)
But it's not just about energy, and it's not only about the data center. For example, why does our planet still waste up to 50% of food? Why are we still supplying full power to vacant homes and offices? Why are over 40,000 Americans still dying every year in car accidents?
Let's solve some of these problems. We have the technology. What are we waiting for? What are you waiting for?
UPDATE: Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors, just released a study which evaluated 63 companies in the technology, consumer products, leisure, and drug sectors. They looked at corporate environmental policies, including focus on averting climate change. The #1 company? IBM. Tesco, Dell, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and Nike round out the top 6.
| by Timothy Sipples | December 8, 2008 in Innovation Permalink |
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