Irish firms urged to cut IT carbon footprints

Businesses in Ireland could consider embracing new IT technologies to reduce their environmental impact, industry experts have claimed.


According to siliconrepublic.com, Mircrosoft’s Bill O’Brien explained that there are currently 120,000 servers in the Irish market with approximately 35,000 more per year scheduled to enter the market.

He said this represents a significant source of carbon emissions.

However, Mr O’Brien said that Irish businesses could opt for virtualisation to reduce costs and energy consumption.

He estimated that if every Irish company switched to virtualisation, it would reduce energy costs by Euro 53m per year.

“[Virtualisation] could potentially make a real and significant contribution by offsetting carbon emissions by over 2m tonnes and reducing cost to businesses from Euro 56m per year to just over Euro 3.5m per year,” he told the website.

“We’ve seen customers virtualise 16 machines down to one machine – there is opportunity there to ensure massive consolidation and make savings in terms of cooling and more efficient servers.”

“This is a hot area right now and offers a lot to business’ bottom line and capability.”

A report published in the UK in December said the country’s IT sector had a carbon footprint similar to that of the aviation industry and recommended more efficient storage of data.

James Cooper

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