In line with that, Sun Microsystems undertook a survey of their customers during the middle of this year to get an idea of how green the Sun community really is.

Here are some interesting statistics from the Sun customers surveyed:

Measurement of carbon emissions

• 22% have practices in place to enable the measurement of carbon emissions
• 36% have no practices in place but are interested in evaluating them
• 33% have no plans to measure carbon emissions

Annual power costs

• 44% spend more than $1 million on power annually
• 8% spend between $750k and $1 million on power annually
• 7% spend between $500k and $750k million on power annually
• 15% spend between $100k and $500k on power annually
• 26% spend less than $100k on power annually

Greening the IT department

• 38% have dedicated green IT plans in place
• 23% plan to deploy eco responsible technology in the next 12 months
• 21% are evaluating putting green IT plans in place
• 15% have no plans at all

Drivers for uptake of green technology

• Reduced power consumption – 78%
• Lower costs – 73%
• Lower carbon emissions and environmental impact (eg recycling) – 61%
• Improved systems performance and utilisation – 50%

Strategies that would help green the IT department

• Energy efficient technologies – 73%
• Systems virtualisation – 66%
• Power and cooling solutions – 59%
• Data centre consolidation – 48%

The message that we’re all hearing now is that greening our IT departments is becoming a major priority for most organisations. If you would like more information about how Sun hardware can help you to meet your greener future, we have plenty of information that can help! Call us on 1800 777 111 or email us directly.

Browse through our September newsletter to see what certain companies are doing in order to head towards a cleaner and greener future. There are also some aspects as to how individual consumers can reduce their energy levels in order to lower the impact on the environment and also the cost to them.

Certain parts of the world have started to introduce taxes that force businesses to pay if they go over a certain amount of carbon emissions. In doing this, countries are hoping that the offsets will dramatically be reduced. Currently this isn’t in place in Australia however it is wise to start reducing carbon emissions immediately so that as a nation we are heading towards a cleaner future.

This month we discuss national greenhouse and energy reporting in Australia. It outlines who needs to report and what information must be provided. It will be the first sort of information in Australia that shows greenhouse and energy performance.

However, no matter what decision the government makes about what will be done, it is crucial that all of Australia starts to make the necessary improvements so that future generations have a clean and green environment.

Energy supply, consumption, and environmental impact are now part of the IT decision process

As energy costs rise and concerns for the environment make the front page, IT managers have a new responsibility in addressing energy efficiency concerns in the IT infrastructure. Executives have always been focused on business growth. But what if your data centre can’t support expansion due to power and cooling limitations or spiraling energy costs?

Solving that problem falls to the IT manager and adding more servers is not the answer

There are numerous challenges involved such as:

• your utility may not have power available;
• your CFO may tell you that energy costs are too high or
• you may not have the necessary cooling capacity in your data centre.

A new focus on IT energy efficiency – building the “green” data centre

Data centre power and cooling requirements top the list of today’s green IT initiatives

Keeping the IT infrastructure adequately cooled and operating efficiently is paramount to a green IT strategy. Careful planning and thoughtful implementation is one way to ensure data centre success.

Another is the selection of the right hardware – so strongly consider storage and servers designed around power efficiency technologies and capabilities.

Explore the IBM solutions to this IT challenge

IBM has been leading the challenge for a green environment

In August 2007 they moved the workload from 3,900 of its own servers to 30 virtualised System z9 mainframes running Linux. They anticipated saving more than US $2 million in energy costs by reducing power consumption by 80%. Now that’s putting your money
where your mouth is!

And to demonstrate out of the box thinking, in Switzerland IBM were part of a solution that used waste heat from a large data centre to heat a local public swimming pool. Talk about a great community service – a service that is not quite so necessary in our home town of Brisbane, but for our southern friends it could be worth considering!

See the IBM Project Big Green Press Room for the lastest green data centre initiatives.

His counterpart, the right honourable leader of the opposition, Mr Nelson (and now, Mr Turnbull), has been counter punching, seeking for more detail to be established and suggesting that 2010 is too soon.

Too soon, too late, too little, too much, what is the deal with these discussions?

There are signs across the globe of the effects of rising temperatures and our elected politicians are doing what they can to be responsible stewards of our country. As always though, their actions will be aimed at where it will have the most impact – at our hip pocket!

Other parts of the globe have already been trading carbon credits for some time and it has been at some expense and when it does come to Australia there is little doubt that it will cost our industry.

The good news is that we have some time to prepare

By being proactive today we can work towards reducing our carbon footprints. By reading the many articles in this newsletter you will find out about many offerings available right now that can reduce your power usage through more effective cooling and through more efficient processing.

Reducing power usage means cost saving now, and reducing your carbon emissions means saving against ETS in the future. It’s a win-win situation!

We don’t know the full impact that global warming will have on our environment. However, we do know that by doing the right thing today we will be leaving future generations with a cleaner, greener and brighter future.

Here’s some information from one of our suppliers on its commitment to reducing the environmental impact of its products and services throughout their lifecycle.

In 1992, HP launched its “Design for Environment” (DfE) program

Its aim was to reduce its impact on the environment by addressing all stages of the HP product lifecycle. This includes:

• designing energy efficient products,
• selecting the right materials,
• reducing parts and
• enabling recyclability.

HP has established a manufacturing process that will reduce its environmental impact. A goal to reduce combined energy consumption of its operations and products to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2010 has been set by HP.

Since 1993, HP has saved 5.25 million tons of CO2 emissions through increases in HP LaserJet Instant-On Technology energy efficiency. This is equal to a year’s emissions for approximately 1.1 million cars.

And for a feather in Computer Merchants cap, HP promotes an Asset Recovery Services program that enables customers to return their products for refurbishment and recycling. HP diverted more than 1.7 million kilograms of IT equipment from Australian landfill through its Asset Recovery Services Programme in 2006 alone.

In 1981, HP was among one of the first technology companies to begin a hardware remarketing program (and Computer Merchants has been doing it since 1979!).

There is a lot of cost involved with adding additional air conditioners and building/remodelling data centres to accommodate for this additional heat - not to mention the effects that this can have on the environment.

Now, solving your data centre thermal dilemma may be as easy as installing a rear door heat exchanger

A rear door heat exchanger may remove up to 50,000 Btu of heat coming out the back of the rack. The thin doors have no moving parts for service and swing wide to help provide unrestricted access. It is very cost effective. The coils filled with above-dew-point, chilled water may passively remove up to 60% of heat generated within the rack.

See also: Rear Door Heat Exchanger, A Method for DataCenter Thermal Management (PDF), Keeping Your Data Center Cool, There Is Another Way (PDF)

With their innovation and black box data centre, Sun hardware can assist a business in lowering their greenhouse emissions while increasing computing and storage growth.

This has been done with the Sun, Fire and CoolThreads technology which consume one third less energy than previous hardware

They take up half the space with double the performance.

The T2000′s have come onto the broker market with 1.2GHz and 1.0GHz 8 core threading these machines which is an improvement in any data centre. If you are looking for a web server that can blast through a heavy work load, take a look at Sun’s CoolThreads. And call us on 1800 777 111.

Dear Margaret,

Talking about Green, my dear Nigel had a Green experience awhile ago. He had a bad shellfish at our favourite seafood restaurant and he hasn’t been able to look our goldfish in the eye since. I didn’t realise that someone could actually turn that particular shade of puce.

And more recently when our neighbour pulled up in his driveway with his brand new 4WD.

It was a beautiful deep sea green colour, which paled in comparison to the green my dear Nigel turned out of pure envy. However Nigel was laughing on the other side of his face when they both turned up at the petrol station. Our neighbour in his 300horsepower 3tonne giant which uses 30 litres/100km going downhill with a 100 knot tailwind, and my Nigel with his company hybrid which coughs if it sniffs any more than a teaspoon of fuel at a time.

To be quite honest, I appreciate the extra dollars that Nigel has left in his pocket as it means he can spoil me that little bit more!

Yours truly,
Jade!

Dear Jade,

Thanks for your letter. Green by name, green by nature!

Aren’t men funny beasts! It sounds like you have a gem (can I suggest Emerald?) in Nigel. Look after him, won’t you! The benefits of using the right tool for the job are many and various. New clothes, dining out, jewellery…flowers! – versus spending big money on purchases and maintenance of oversized and overspecialised giants.

If I was the boss of my home (and I think you are!) I know which option I’d prefer!

Margaret

Active Energy Manager (formally IBM Director PowerExecutive) measures, monitors, and manages the energy components built into IBM systems enabling a cross-platform management solution. Active Energy Manager is an extension of IBM Director that supports BladeCenter, POWER Systems and System x servers.

It also provides a source of energy management data that can be exploited by Tivoli enterprise solutions such as Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager. Active Energy Manager is a key component of IBM’s Cool Blue portfolio within Project Big Green.

This solution helps customers monitor energy consumption to allow better utilization of available energy resources. The application software enables customers to trend actual energy consumption and corresponding thermal loading of IBM Systems running in their environment with their applications.

Active Energy Manager has other advantages as well

• It’s the only energy management software tool that can provide a single view of the actual power usage across multiple platforms
• It increases energy efficiency by controlling power use across the data centre
• It can limit server power consumption by capping maximum power consumption
• It can improve energy efficiency resulting in substantial savings and cost reductions
• It offers out of the box management for single IBM systems while being able to provide a cross environment view of power and thermal usage within an IT shop
• Plan for the future by viewing trends of power usage over time
• Monitor and report actual power usage and thermal information
• Use power trending to assist in better data centre decision making.

Active Energy Manager is a cornerstone of IBM’s Project Big Green initiative.

Learn more about IBM Active Energy Manager (including their 60 day free trial download).

Many organisations with personal devices like printers have cupboards full of ink and toners. We tend to order them in bulk for convenience rather than a need to save on cost. When the printers etc are replaced or removed, these consumables are left sitting on the shelves creating a stock problem with environmental consequences and recycling issues.

Ensuring that printer and copier fleets are managed via consolidation of models and supply management can help manage the environmental impact of printing.

A few things to look for when purchasing devices are:

• energy usage,
• supply chain consumption, and
• work flow processes.

The legislation is important for governments, business, and the Australian community by:

• Providing robust data to underpin the environmental and financial integrity of Australia’s national emissions trading scheme
• Reducing the number of greenhouse and energy reports required across State, Territory and Australian Government programs
• Providing corporate level information to the public on greenhouse and energy performance of Australian corporations for the first time.

Do I need to report now?

Corporations who might meet thresholds and aren’t already collecting greenhouse gas emissions and energy data should begin collating that information and keeping records from 1 July 2008. Most corporations likely to be affected by the legislation have systems or processes in place for reporting under mandatory or voluntary government programs or to meet investor or shareholder demands.

Although data collection should begin now, Corporations have until 31 October 2009 to submit their report under the Act.

Who needs to report?

From 1 July 2008, corporations will be required to register and report for the 2008-2009 financial year if:

• They control a facility that emits 25 kilotonnes or more of greenhouse gases (CO2 equivalent), or produce or consume 100 terajoules or more of energy; or
• Their corporate group emits 125 kilotonnes or more greenhouse gases (CO2 equivalent), or produces or consume 500 terajoules or more of energy.
• Lower thresholds for corporate groups will be phased in by 2010-11. The final thresholds will be 50 kilotonnes of greenhouse gases (CO2 equivalent) or 200 terajoules of energy.

An online calculator is available to help corporations assess if they are likely to meet thresholds.

What is the coverage?

By the 2010-11 reporting period the legislation is expected to cover around 700 medium and large corporations. The reporting system will improve data coverage to over 70% of greenhouse gas emissions in the covered sectors. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, land use, land use change and forestry activities will not be included until methodologies for reporting at the facility and corporation level are sufficiently developed.

Taken from www.climatechange.gov.au/reporting/publications/pubs/ngers-presentation.pdf

Notes:

• TJ = terajoule (1012 joules) of energy consumed or produced
• kt = kilotonne (106 kilograms) CO2-e equivalent of greenhouse gases emitted

Conversion factors:

• Energy
  • 1 terajoule = 1000 gigajoules
  • 1 gigajoule = 1000 megajoules
  • 1 megajoule = 1000 kilojoules
  • 1 kilojoule = 1000 joules
• CO2-e emissions
  • 1 kilotonne = 1000 tonnes
  • 1 tonne = 1000 kilograms

More Information

• Visit www.climatechange.gov.au/reporting,
• Email: reporting@climatechange.gov.au
• or call 1800 081 831.

For information on emissions trading visit the Department of Climate Change website.

Many of you have heard about blades, in fact, many of you are probably running blades. However for those of you wanting to know more about this new technology, please read on!

What is a BladeCenter Blade Server?

The term Blade Server refers to a thin, ultra dense enclosure that houses microprocessors, memory, disk, networking and other features. Multiple blade servers are inserted into a rack mounted chassis called the BladeCenter.

Normally with a typical server you would find power supplies, ethernet connections, cooling, media optical drives and other ports. The BladeCenter provides this functionality as well as a connection between the blades to achieve redundancy, high reliability and increased density.

Importantly, the IBM BladeCenter offers energy efficient designs and powerful IBM “cool blue” tools to help plan, monitor, control and allocate power consumption and cooling.

Chassis

BladeCenter S

The IBM BladeCenter S is designed for small and medium sized offices with limited IT skills needs. Its target is to be simplistic and economic. It does this by being small enough to fit under a desk and its ability to run by plugging into an average wall power socket. One of the main advantages of this chassis is that it offers disk storage (up to 12 disks) so that no separate external disk storage needs to be purchased.

BladeCenter E

The IBM BladeCenter E is tailored towards space and power constrained data centres. This chassis holds up to 14 blade servers and is 7U high. The BladeCenter E has an extremely dense design and is up to 11% more efficient in power and cooling than its main competition.

BladeCenter H

The H Chassis is IBM’s high performance blade. The 9U rack houses 14 blades and is fully compatible using the same blades and switches with the entire family of BladeCenter systems. It also supports industry standard I/O switches from Cisco, Brocade and others so you are able to have more choice and flexibility for your environment.

It achieves high speed connectivity through 4 x10GB ethernet and rich telecom functionality. It also has the ability to increase bandwidth and throughput for demanding applications such as IPTV, VoD, IMS and security.

BladeCenter T

This model was designed by IBM to meet the rugged needs of the telecom industry. The T chassis is NEBS 3/ETSI compliant and meets standards for electromagnetic compatibility, thermal robustness, fire resistance, earthquake and office vibration resistance and airborne contaminant resistance!

Another feature is optional hot-swappable redundant AC or DC power supplies and cooling and built-in systems management resources in a 20″ deep chassis. The chassis is 8U rack optimised and houses up to 8 Blade Servers.

BladeCenter HT

This is IBM’s Telco version of the BladeCenter HT and is the correct choice for the ultimate combination of high performance and durability in telco, military, medical, government and industrial scenarios. Again this model is available with AC or DC power as well as high speed switching with multi terabit networking, 10Gbps switch fabric.

The BladeCenter HT is the largest in size being 12U, it houses 12 Blade Servers.

Blade Servers

The most common blade servers available from IBM are split into 3 areas:

• Intel Based,
• AMD Based, and
• Power Based.

Below is a quick overview of some of the Blade Servers available.

Intel Based

HS12 – 1-socket single, dual or quad-core Intel® Xeon®
HS21 – 2-socket dual-core or quad-core Intel® Xeon

AMD Based

LS21 – 2-socket dual-core AMD Opteron
LS22 – 2-socket quad-core AMD Opteron
LS41 – 4-socket dual-core AMD Opteron
LS42 – 4-socket quad-core AMD Opteron

POWER Based – Runs AIX , OS/400 and Linux for Power

JS12 – 1-socket dual-core 64-bit IBM POWER6^TM with AltiVec^TM SIMD accelerator
JS21 – 2-socket single-core or dual-core 64-bit IBM PowerPC® 970MP with AltiVec SIMD accelerator
JS22 – 2-socket dual-core 64-bit IBM POWER6^TM with AltiVec^TM SIMD accelerator

The POWER6 processor has several new features, including:

• power trending,
• power saver mode, and
• thermal reporting.

So what do these features do exactly?

Power Trending collects information to predict the power consumption of the data centre at various times of the day, week, or month. It uses that information to identify peak times, manage loads when electrical demands or costs are high, and if the system supports power capping, determine appropriate power caps.

Power Saver Mode provides a way to save power by being able to drop the voltage and frequency to a fixed percentage when the server is being underutilized.

Thermal Reporting helps identify server “hot-spots” that need attention. You can monitor the measured ambient temperature and a calculated exhaust heat index temperature via Active Energy Manager.

This all adds up to POWER6 technology being power efficient and a green technology.

See also: IBM EnergyScale for POWER6 Processor-Based Systems (PDF)

South Australia

It is anticipated that:

• Additional mandatory reporting will be introduced (as soon as 2010) for major business operating in the state;
• In line with South Australia’s Strategic Plan 2007, greenhouse gas emissions will need to be reduced by at least 60 percent by 2050. Thus, aggressive reduction targets will be progressively imposed on business over the coming years;
• Industry will also embrace renewable energy and increase usage to 20 percent by 2014.

South Australia has committed to establish a national emissions trading scheme no later than 2010. Additionally, South Australia’s Strategic Plan commits the state to:

• Meet the Kyoto target (108 percent of 1990 levels) by 2012;
• Increase the use of public transport to 10 percent by 2018;
• Reduce South Australia’s ecological foot print by 30 percent by 2050;
• Improve the energy efficiency of Government buildings by 25 percent by 2014;
• Reduce total emissions from the state Government operations by 60 percent by 30 June 2020;
• Purchase a minimum of 20 percent Green Power by 1 January 2008;
• Improved energy efficiency for new housing;
• Convert 50 percent of State Government cars to more environmentally friendly fuels.

Reference: Climate Change and Greenhouse Emissions Reduction Act 2007. Tackling Climate Change: South Australia’s Greenhouse Strategy

New South Wales

The State has committed to a national emissions trading scheme no later than 2010.

• NSW Government has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from 158.2 million tonnes (2005 level) to 63.3 million tonnes by 2050. Such a target will affect all levels of business;
• Under the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme, electricity retailers must meet mandatory scheme will have a flow-on effect to all levels of business;
• All new residential development is required in reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, compared to the NSW average.

The Government has also implemented strategies to reduce business uncertainty by establishing carbon constraints in order to promote investment and innovation. This decision provides a clear signal of intent, assists industry risks management, provides investor confidence and promotes technical innovation in a carbon constrained future.

NSW is also committed to:

• Meet Kyoto target (108 percent of 1990 levels) by 2012;
• Achieve energy efficiency requirements for new housing;
• Introducing a green vehicle registration program to allow drivers to offset their vehicle emissions.

Reference: The NSW Greenhouse Plan 2005. NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change

Victoria

Large corporations are forced to set reduction targets for their energy consumption through the Environment and Resource Efficiency Plans (EREP) Program.

• A pilot program that required greenhouse gas emissions reporting and disclosure has been implemented in 25 companies;
• EPA Works’ Approval and Licensing are required to implement best practice with respect to greenhouse gas emissions;
• Landmark Climate Change Bill to be introduced requiring greenhouse gas abatement, and development of ecoefficiency standards for industry;
• Reduced greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60 percent by 2050 (from 121.9 million tonnes in 2005 to 48.8 million tonnes in 2050). This reduction target will have a flow-on effect to all levels of business;
• Mandating five star environmental ratings for all new Government offices;
• Increase Victorian renewable energy generation to 10 percent by 2016;
• The EPA Greenhouse Program is the first regulatory greenhouse and energy efficiency program for industry in Australia requiring the implementation of best practices with respect to greenhouse gas emissions and energy audits for existing licensed premises.

The State Government has stated it will establish a national emissions trading scheme no later than 2010.

It has also committed to:

• Meet the Kyoto target (108 percent of 1990 levels) by 2012;
• Achieve energy efficiency requirements for new housing.

Reference: Sustainability Action Statement 2006.  Victorian Climate Change Program

Western Australia

The Western Australia’s Greenhouse Strategy (2004) defines several objectives for its response to global climate change.

The State is committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60 percent by 2050.

• Major industrial greenhouse gas procedures required to report their emissions annually along with their reduction strategies;
• Large and medium sized power consumers forced to comply with a mandatory energy efficiency scheme;
• The WA Government is committed to reduce green house gas emissions from 71 million tonnes (2007 level) to approximately 26 million tonnes by 2050. This reduction target will have a flow-on effect to all levels of business;
• Emission reduction strategies and targets have been developed for key sectors of the economy.

The Government will work to minimise its own contribution by demonstrating emission reductions which will impact on the supply chain of business to the government.

A Greenhouse Abatement fund will be created to hold and deal with organic sequestration rights and credits generated by
Government institutions.

Reference: Premier’s Climate Change Action Statement. Climate change: Making Decisions for the Future (PDF). WA Department of Environmentand Conservation

Queensland

Queensland will:

Reduce emissions by at least 60 percent by 2050 (from 157 million tones in 2005 to 62.8 in 2050). This reduction target will have a flow-on effect to all levels of business;

• Aim for renewable and low-emission energy target of 10 percent by 2020;
• Introduce additional mandatory reporting (as soon as 2010) for medium and major businesses operating in Queensland;
• Progressively impose aggressive emission reduction targets on business;
• Introduce a Queensland Carbon Offsets Policy to ensure that industries are ready for any emissions trading scheme introduced nationally.

Queensland Government Environmental Offsets Policy (PDF)

The Queensland Government is also committed to:

• Establish a feed-in tariff which will pay consumers for energy they contribute to the electricity grid from a solar panel system;
• Ensure new commercial buildings reach a minimum four-star energy efficiency rating from 2010 under the Australian Building Greenhouse Rating Scheme;
• Achieving carbon neutrality for Government office buildings by 2020;
• Incorporating into development assessment processes under the Integrated Planning Act 1997 a State Planning Policy to ensure climate change issues are addressed;
• Ensure new houses install non-electric water heaters;
• Phase out the use of electric hot water systems in existing homes from 2010;
• Introduce a system of motor vehicle transfer duty requirements based on the number of cylinders in an effort to reduce emissions.

Reference: Climate Smart 2050 Queensland Climate Change Strategy. Environmental Protection Agency Queensland

We often receive calls from our customers asking us to make an offer to purchase a server they have finished with. In order for us to correctly value your server and find every item of value in the server, we need to get the server’s configuration.

Quite often when we are offered a server and we start to ask about its details, we are told the server has been turned off and packed away and that they don’t have a copy of its configuration. This means they may miss out on getting some money for their old server.

Where we can, we like to buy pre-loved equipment and re-sell it again. This helps the customer we buy from, the customer we sell to, and the environment.

So here are the commands you will need in order to get that configuration to us.

For an IBM System i server:

• From the command line, type: strsst
• Choose menu option 1: start service tools
• Choose menu option 7: hardware service manager
• Then press “F6″ to print the configuration

Take the default page settings and either print the configuration to your system printer, or email it to us

For an IBM System p server:

• Type the following from the command line: lscfg -vp

“Fujitsu debuts powerful next generation of entry level servers with Mainframe-like performance and reliability”

“Sun‘s high-end servers and storage systems combine the power of Mainframe-like technology with the availability, scalability, and manageability you need to harness the benefits of rehosting.”

“(HP‘s)…solution has the ability to deliver Mainframe-like quality of service with a more agile, cost effective platform.”

Far from being a dinosaur on the brink of extinction, the Mainframe continues to deliver industry leading reliability, security and performance to its users offering 99.999% uptime.

Think about 99% uptime over the course of a year. It sounds good until you realize that means 87.6 hours (nearly 4 days) of outage!

IBM, through its mainframe, offers five 9′s availability

How does it do it?

With more than 40 years of experience, the Mainframe has been doing for a long time what seems to be “new technologies” on other platforms. For example, logical partitioning has been a mainframe feature for a long time. In the development of the mainframe, hardware, software, storage and network are designed for maximum application availability.

Mainframe continues to grow and develop, and may be the answer to many data centres environmental issues in the future. If you have a growing problem with Linux on an expanding array of Intel servers, perhaps you should give consideration to a Mainframe. Call us on 1800 777 111.

Because Computer Merchants has been Green since 1979!

Yes we refurbish used computers, recycle parts and turn the lights off at night. But we go further than that ladies and gentlemen. We are focused on being ‘Green’, continually taking steps in the right direction as we strive to use more and more recycled goods.

Our Green products stretch from the kitchen and bathroom with our biodegradable cleaning products straight out to the warehouse. Not only is it the cleaning agents but the hand towels too. So the next time you receive equipment from Computer Merchants rest assured it has been cleaned and wiped down with environmentally friendly, recycled and recyclable products.

Our stationery suppliers are currently producing recycled and recyclable items, from the usual day to day paper products like notebooks, copier and printer paper and napkins, to plastic goods including desk trays, tidy trays, waste bins and magazine holders! Each product in their range contains recycled material and is recyclable too. Their product packaging is at a minimum and recycled packaging material is used where possible – what more could you ask for?!

In our recent Computer Merchants staff meeting the Managing Director, Norman Jefferies updated staff members on the research we are doing to establish our use of carbon and water per person. He has also asked if any staff members have any further ideas on how we as a team can take steps to further help the environment.

Just recently we have supplied our unused media CDs to a local organisation that provides recreational activities for kids to turn items like these into works of art. What was once trash will now be recycled into treasure for Mum and Dad!

Now that I have brought you up to speed with the green habits of Computer Merchants, we will continue to do our bit to remain green with our recyclable stationery, biodegradable cleaning products, and reduce our carbon and water usage which are all necessary steps in helping our environment and future generations.

We will calculate and publish our carbon and water useage per person so that we can publicly work towards improving this and share our progress.

 We meant it.

Our Water Usage

Calculated as the number of litres of water used, averaged per person per day, we used 74% less water in 2007 than in 2005. Much of these water reductions relate to changes made in the landscaping on our premises.

Our Power Consumption

Our Total Power Consumption for 2007 was 75,551 kWh for 23 staff. We are working with our air conditioning maintenance company to reduce our energy consumption. We will reduce the numbers of hours that the air conditioners run by changing the times when they automatically turn on and off. We expect a slight saving in power consumption based on this, but each small saving adds up.

Our Carbon Footprint

Our Total Carbon Emissions for 2007 were 79.9 tonnes.

We used the following equation to calculate our footprint:

Emissions = (t CO₂-e) = (75,551 x 1.058 ) / 1000 = 79.9 tonnes

This equation is from the Australian Greenhouse Office Factors and Methods Workbook, August 2004. The most recent version of the workbook is available online: www.climatechange.gov.au/workbook/

A few weeks ago though we met a challenge: the disposal of approximately 1,000 redundant CDs. After talking to a number of organisations, we found that their methods have the same end result as just throwing the CDs in the bin – the CDs end up as land fill.

One of our sales representatives (Dimitra) told us about an organisation in Brisbane called Reverse Garbage. They receive all sorts of materials and then sell them for such uses as school projects, theatre productions and arts and crafts. We delivered our redundant CDs and cases to them without any hassles.

Anyone interested in the “green friendly” disposal of CDs and the like should check out their website at:

www.reversegarbage.com.au

IBM energy management and browser-based virtualization software makes it easier to achieve increased server utilization and energy efficiency by using EnergyScale capabilities and optional PowerVM Editions which functions include:

• Recovery from intermittent errors or failover to redundant components
• Detection and reporting of failures and impending failures
• Self-healing hardware that automatically initiates actions to effect error correction, repair or component replacement are designed to deliver exceptional application availability and allow more work to be processed with less disruption.

The POWER6 processor within the p520 and p550 Express servers, is designed with Hardware Decimal Floating-Point, helping to improve the performance of the basic mathematical calculations of financial transactions that occur daily on today’s business computers.

In addition, the processor includes an AltiVec SIMD accelerator, which helps to improve the performance of high performance computing workloads.

Energy Efficiency With EnergyScale Technology

Also designed to help clients become more energy efficient, the POWER6 architecture with EnergyScale technology includes features that measure the energy use of the system and direct policies toward the energy-efficient operation of the server, while the underlying hardware automatically adjusts to deliver the desired operating solution.

p520 Express Server

The p520 Express server has 1, 2, or 4 (4.2 GHz POWER6) processor cores which deliver performance at compelling low prices for use as a distributed application server, small database server, or in a high transaction environment based on the Java platform. The p520 Express server will be available on February 29, 2008.

p550 Express Server

The p550 Express server has 2, 4, 6 or 8 (3.5 GHz or 4.2 GHz POWER6) processor cores which deliver outstanding price/performance as an application or mid-size database server and helps to reduce costs as a Linux consolidation server. The p550 Express server will be available on February 8, 2008.

Both the p520 and p550 Express are packaged as a desk side or 4U (4 EIA Units) rack-mount.

Contact Us

Call us today on 1800 777 111 or email us to learn more aboout the p520 and p550 Express servers.