16 Jun 2011
Stuart Dommett, business development manager at Intel, told delegates at Computing's IT Leaders Forum that businesses should not replace their physical PC estate with thin clients just to fulfil a green agenda.
"What is greener, a five-year-old PC or a thin client? The five-year-old PC," asked Dommett.
He added that he had been arguing this point in discussions with the government. "If you are going to throw away something that is perfectly usable, that's not green," he said.
"I think a lot of organisations are making technology architecture decisions without actually understanding the business rationale behind doing it. You don't have to refresh your whole architecture to achieve some of the benefits of a green agenda."
Dommett argued that enterprises and CIOs should understand their green strategy fully before trying to establish solutions such as thin clients. He suggested that other virtualisation techniques could be more effective.
"By using virtualisation, you can start to deliver green efficiencies. You can keep your PC estate but begin to take the operating system off it. You can use virtualisation to stream the operating system to the PC or provide a hosted desktop," he said.
"Always consider your business case, and use other techniques to save your old PCs when you can."
With government drives for public sector efficiency and private sector organisations facing continued capital expenditure freezes, avoiding hardware replacement without excellent business reasons is certainly an obvious way to save costs.
Yet every day across the country in both public and private sector organisations, equipment that is performing well, is stable and continuing to meet business needs is being ripped out and replaced at huge cost to the customer. Is it really necessary to replace a machine that is perfectly reliable; that delivers the performance required and, critically, has a stable operating system/application environment?
With aging kit running business critical applications, organisations will be understandably concerned about reliability, the speed of availability of spare parts and the responsiveness of any support operation and the green argument is another reason being over played by some parties to provide additional weight to their ‘buy more’ agenda. But is it really greener to scrap an entire system every three years in favour of one that uses a few less Amps and perhaps demands less data centre space and air conditioning?
The answer is not a simple one; however in many cases, it is far better for the environment to extend the life of existing equipment – even by just a couple of years – rather than continually ripping out and replacing, and there are companies that have been helping customers to do this for many years.
Irrespective of whether it is reducing capital expenditure or improving green credentials that drive the agenda, organisations should feel able and confident to make upgrade decisions giving due consideration to all aspects including green issues, but not ‘corralled’ into a decision based on misleading information or marketing spin.
http://www.maindec.com
Posted by: Paul Timms, Operations Director, Maindec 22 Jun 2011
Have your say on this article
Newsletters
Latest stories from Operating Systems
Latest videos
You may also like
Operating Systems jobs
Technology Patent Wars
Case studies from large organisations across all sectors
... And rich media, and flexible working, and peaks in traffic ...
Upcoming Events
Join us for this Computing web seminar, in which the Head of BI at the Co-operative Group Nick Colebourn will be explaining just how he reigned in the Group’s sprawling database estate and how significant savings were realised and data quality improved as a result.
Date: 31 May 2012
Time: 11:00 AM
Live June 13th 11:00am: Register now. During this web seminar we will be looking at the sorts of incidents that can bring data centres grinding to a halt and what can be done about them.
Date: 13 Jun 2012
Time: 11:00 am
Receive the latest jobs direct to your inbox
Are you being paid what you are worth?
